Alexander Knaifel was
trained as a cellist and studied with
Rostropovich in Moscow. He studied composition
with Boris Arapov in Leningrad. Apart
from a couple of early works, his present
output is quite astonishing, and his
music is unlike anything else written
by his contemporaries. The sometimes
extravagant layout of his pieces might
be compared with that of his older colleague
Ustvolskaya. That said, many of his
works are considerably longer than hers,
some of them lasting for a couple of
hours such as Agnus Dei
heard here and Nika. Many
of them, too, are for completely unusual
instrumental combinations such as 150.000.000
(1966) on words by Mayakovsky for mixed
chorus, six piccolos, six trumpets,
six trombones, violins, double basses
and timpani, or Solaris
(1980) for 35 Javanese gongs. Some of
you may remember that his opera The
Canterville Ghost after Wilde
has once been available on disc. His
music conjures a sense of the timeless
- "Endlessness and oneness in
the manifestations of the Sound-World
mystery", Knaifel’s own words.
It unfolds out of time, as in Agnus
Dei for four instrumentalists
a cappella (sic) which plays
for two hours in the present performance.
Frans Lemaire in his indispensable book
La musique du Vingtième Siècle
en Russie, published by Fayard in
1994, mentions that Agnus Dei
plays for two hours and twenty minutes.
Agnus Dei was inspired
by the sketchy diary of a young Russian
girl, Tanya Savichev, who bluntly records
the death of various family members
in 1942 ending with the cruelly painful
comment "The Savichevs dead/all
dead/left one Tanya"; nobody
knows what happened to her. Agnus
Dei may be experienced as a
slow-moving, ritualistic Requiem in
memory of Tanya and of all suffering
souls. According to the composer’s own
words, "Agnus Dei
may have been created in repentance
for my non-existent fault of being born
outside Leningrad". Knaifel conjures
up an extraordinary sound-world out
of some limited basic material and an
unusual instrumental ensemble in which
each instrumentalist also has to play
some percussion and operate electronic
processing as well as playing various
keyboards - presumably samplers, though
we are not told. The electronic sound
processing, always subtly and tastefully
done, results in a highly original sound
palette in which one is never sure of
which instrument is playing. This blurring
effect is obtained through what might
be best described as trompe l’oeil
technique, which means that instruments
begin to play ‘live’ and that their
sounds are progressively transformed
into something else, that cannot always
be clearly identified. Examples abound
in this endlessly inventive score. I
find it all quite beguiling and often
deeply moving in its apparent simplicity;
but slow-moving music such as this may
not be to everyone’s taste. As I remarked
in an earlier
review of a Knaifel disc (ECM New
Series 1763), music of this type is
likely to fascinate and irritate as
well depending on one’s frame of mind.
Megadisc have so far
released a number of outstanding recordings
of unfamiliar Russian music of the 20th
Century (Silvestrov,
Ustvolskaya,
Smirnov,
to name but a few) as well as another
Knaifel disc (MDC 7855 - not reviewed)
with his piano music played by Oleg
Malov. This one is, as far as I am concerned,
the finest and a major release by any
reckoning, although this is by no means
easy stuff to come to terms with. Excellent
performance and superb recorded sound
throughout.
Hubert Culot
Louison Renault (percussion, electronics); Jean-Philippe
Collard (keyboards, percussion, electronics);
Serge Bertocchi (saxophones, keyboards, percussion,
electronics); Jean-Paul Dessy (double bass, percussion,
keyboards, electronics) 