Arnold Schoenberg enlightened night. A. Schoenberg: String Sextet "Enlightened Night". Early years. Tonal period of creativity

The founder of the New Vienna School, Arnold Schoenberg, most fully and consistently embodied the aesthetic principles of musical expressionism in his work. This is one of those composers whose name is inextricably linked with the idea of ​​the specifics of the musical language of the 20th century, of its fundamental differences from the musical language of all previous eras.

At the same time, the work of Schoenberg, in contrast to the work of other composers who determined the evolution of music of the 20th century, has not yet won universal recognition and still continues to be a controversial phenomenon. Various explanations have been offered for this, but one thing is certain: the very logic of Schoenberg’s creative evolution led to the musical language that it became since the late 900s. This language, among other things, is distinguished by a special concentration of musical “information”, emphasized by the avoidance of inertial moments, which cannot but limit its communicative capabilities - both in terms of listener perception and in terms of performance implementation, which is usually associated with significant difficulties. In general, the evolution of Schoenberg’s musical language allows us to outline three periods in his work: tonal (since 1897), atonal, or the period of free atonality (since 1909), and dodecaphonic (since 1923).

Early years. Tonal period of creativity

Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874 in Vienna into a poor merchant family and lost his father at the age of eight. The family's financial situation turned out to be difficult, so Arnold was unable to receive either a systematic general or musical education. He was self-taught, except for short-term counterpoint lessons with the famous conductor and composer Alexander Tsemlinsky, who immediately appreciated the outstanding talent of the young musician. Basically, Schoenberg himself had to master the basics of musical art and at the same time earn a living from work that was of no interest to a creatively gifted person (service in a bank, etc.).

The first work that attracted widespread attention to the name of Schoenberg as a composer was the string sextet “ Enlightened night", op. 4 (1899) *,

The program for which was the poem of the same name by the German poet Richard Demel *.

The sextet easily reveals the influences of Wagner and Liszt, Mahler and Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky; those elements of style that would later determine the creative face of Schoenberg himself are still completely invisible. However, one should not rush into accusations of eclecticism and lack of independence. In fact, we are faced with a unique phenomenon: in the musical language of the sextet, an organic synthesis of the great romantic styles of the second half of the 19th century is amazingly achieved - the work does not at all turn into a divertissement of different composer styles. Moreover, in “Enlightened Night” Schoenberg already appears fully armed with mastery. The work is distinguished by its perfection of form, romantic spirituality, combined with psychological depth, it demonstrates an extraordinary generosity of imagination: in an endless melodic development, a succession of lyrical and declamatory themes pass through, one better than the other. It is significant that the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who questioned the significance of Schoenberg’s talent and in the 20s did not show much zeal in promoting his symphonic works (to the displeasure of their author), only “Enlightened Night” did not deny genius. To this day it remains one of Schoenberg's most frequently performed works.

“The Enlightened Night” sounded a wonderful “final chord” of German music of the 19th century (in 1899!). In Schoenberg's works immediately following Op. 4, expressionist features are clearly visible, the tension of the musical language sharply increases, which reflects the pre-storm atmosphere of the years preceding the First World War.

Already in the musical fabric of the symphonic poem “Pelléas et Mélisande” after Maeterlinck (op. 5, 1903), the First String Quartet, d-moll (op. 7, 1905), the First Chamber Symphony for fifteen instruments (op. 9, 1906) *

and especially the Second String Quartet, fis-moll (op. 10, 1908) *,

* In the last two movements of the quartet, a female voice is heard as a soloist (texts by Stefan Gheorghe).

One can see, and the further, the more, a steady desire to avoid manifestations of inertia and commonplaces, which leads to a significant compaction of musical time and extreme intensity of expression. The traditional stabilizing factors of musical structure are increasingly being replaced: the regularity of metrical pulsation and the known stability of rhythm elements, a clear distribution of musical fabric into textured plans and measured periodicity in changes in types of texture and timbres, the predominant squareness of syntactic structures, sequentiality, distribution of musical material according to one or another classical compositional pattern. scheme, exact reprises. The non-individualized figurative movement (the so-called general forms of sound), which among the classics of the past set off the thematic relief both vertically and horizontally, is also gone. But what is even more important is that in all of these works the process of decentralization of the classical mode-tonal system, which began in the romantic music of the 19th century, sharply accelerates. A noticeable weakening of modal-functional attractions that regulate the deployment of the melodic horizontal and the change of the harmonic vertical increasingly disrupts the inertia in the pitch fabric.

Indicative in this regard is the secondary theme and its treatment in the first movement of the Second String Quartet. The theme melody, sounding on the chord of the dominant function in the key of B-dur, contains a thrown dissonant sound that is completely inconsistent with the logic of classical modal thinking h- melodic intonation here is freed from the control of harmony and modal gravity acting through it. As a result, the melody is transformed from a sequence of conjugate degrees of the mode into a sequence of conjugate intervals. Its pattern is perceived not only in total, but to a large extent and differentiated: auditory attention is fixed at each interval:

The same features appear during the development of a secondary theme: when returning, its intonation changes much more intensely than is usually observed in classics or romantics. This emphasizes the expressive significance of every smallest melodic cell, every interval:

The composer’s desire to avoid a number of qualities of musical structure, which previously seemed to go without saying (from the clarity of metrical pulsation to modal functionality), was conscious; among his like-minded people it was associated with a new musical aesthetics - “aesthetics of avoidance” (“Aesthetik des Vermeidens” ). Based on it, Schoenberg individualized many of the functional connections of the musical structure, thereby depriving its development of moments of predictability, for individualized connections turn out to be veiled, covertly control development, and do not create obvious gravity.

“Aesthetics of avoidance” directly followed from the general ideological and aesthetic guidelines of expressionist art, which asserted the artist’s right to a subjective vision of the world, even to the point of deforming reality. All this later led to a break with a wide audience, to the elitist isolation of expressionist music. And Schoenberg was fully aware of this. In the collection of articles he compiled toward the end of his life, “Style and Idea,” where his aesthetic views are expressed with literary brilliance, he, in the article “New Music, Outdated Music, Style and Idea,” definitely defends “art for art’s sake”: “Not one the artist... will not humiliate himself in order to adapt to the slogan “art for everyone,” because if it is art, then it is not for everyone, and if it is for everyone, then it is not art.” True, the elitism of Schoenberg’s aesthetics does not at all mean a denial of the social role of musical creativity. The article “Heart and Brain in Music” from the same collection speaks of the desire for creativity, designed to “say something important to humanity,” about music as a “prophetic message” showing people the way to higher forms of life.

One way or another, the predominance of centrifugal tendencies in musical form created the danger of its collapse. To avoid looseness, Schoenberg sought the same thematic unity of texture and development that was observed in the best works of Brahms and Beethoven. This was a well-known departure from the principles of the “aesthetics of avoidance,” since the unity of thematic content is one of the factors of the inertia of the musical structure. But with such means it was still impossible to fully compensate for the losses incurred by the musical form.

In general, even the First Chamber Symphony and the Second String Quartet, the last works of the tonal period, still remain in line with the late Romantic style. However, their musical language, while maintaining a connection with the language of “Enlightened Night,” is distinguished by even greater psychological depth, sharpness and tension, and the composer’s individuality appears much more clearly in it.

Among the works of the tonal period, the cantata “ Songs of Gurre"(without opus) to the text of the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen in the German translation by R. F. Arnold. It was mainly written in 1900, but Schoenberg completed the orchestration only in 1911, after creating the first works based on completely different aesthetic and technical principles. The premiere of "Songs of Gurre", held in Vienna on February 23, 1913, conducted by Franz Schrecker, a friend of Schoenberg, turned out to be triumphant. But the author of the cantata paid almost no attention to what later turned out to be the greatest success of his life as a composer and did not even want to go out to the loudly applauding audience. With great difficulty they forced him to appear on the stage, where he, still not noticing the audience, only thanked the performers. The reason for this, he admitted, was the confidence that the people who gave him an ovation would not follow him on the path of daring innovation that had already begun. What was approved by enthusiastic listeners was already a turned page for Schoenberg himself.

Jacobsen's poem, which serves as the basis for the Songs of Gurre, tells the story of the tragic love of the Danish king Valdemar for the beautiful girl Tova, who was killed on the orders of his wife, the jealous queen Hedwig. Thus, Schoenberg's work once again develops the traditional romantic motif of love and death.

The cantata is distinguished by the grandeur of its overall design and at the same time the filigree finishing of every smallest detail. Monumentality in it is organically combined with extreme sophistication, which is characteristic of many masterpieces of late romantic music. The work impresses with its unusual generosity of composer's imagination, richness of texture, and psychological depth of harmony. It uses all imaginable performing forces: a huge orchestra, three male and one mixed choir, five solo singers and a reciter - the Storyteller.

Only the enormous difficulties associated with the complex performing apparatus, which turn each performance of the cantata into an event in musical life, do not allow it to equal the popularity of “Enlightened Night”. Her musical language is devoid of innovation, beginning with Pelléas et Mélisande. As in op. 4, here one senses a spectrum of influences, synthesized into an individual style, which, however, is far from the style that will later represent the most fundamental creative achievements of the composer. Nevertheless, if the Songs of Gurre had been able to close the creative evolution of Schoenberg, he would still have gone down in music history. For this purpose, the works he has already created, accessible to a fairly wide audience and at the highest level of skill and inspiration, would be enough. It is even possible that in this case his reputation as a composer would be much higher today - at least in the eyes of many music lovers who do not understand the language of his later works. And yet, Schoenberg was not afraid to turn off the road leading to success, which was well-deserved and lasting. This alone should strengthen confidence in his further searches.

By the 1900s, the composer had gained quite a high reputation in the musical circles of Vienna and Berlin. The premieres of his works, although usually accompanied by scandals, were a resounding success among a certain part of the public. Schoenberg highly valued Mahler's friendly participation, although he did not approve of everything in his works.

At this time, Schoenberg's teaching career began: he rallied a large group of inquisitive young composers looking for new paths in music. Among them are Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who were greatly influenced by their teacher. Later, both were destined to enter the history of music next to him - as members of the Novo-Viennese triad of composers (it is understood that the first triad was Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven). In his teaching, Schoenberg did not limit himself to studying new music (rather, he even avoided it, believing that he “could not teach freedom”), but demanded from young people a thorough knowledge of the classics, the ability to competently understand the styles and compositional techniques of the great music of the past. Many students in their memoirs noted a strong impression from his magnificent analyzes of the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, based on the deepest comprehension of the author's intention and the means of its implementation. By the way, Schoenberg’s “Doctrine of Harmony” (1911) is mainly devoted to chords and methods of pairing them within the framework of the classical system of harmony, with which his own creative practice was already little connected. Thus, in Schoenberg we see a not so common example of a composer obsessed with creativity, capable at the same time of being deeply interested in “alien” music, and not only that belonging to one or several idols, but music in an encyclopedic volume. Later, his excellent knowledge of the classics was reflected even in his works, which sharply broke with the letter of tradition.

Sketches of beauty

Kandinsky and Schoenberg at the Jewish Museum
Everything created by sane people will be eclipsed by the creations of the frenzied.
Plato
Eternal music... If you, dear readers, just like me, were captivated, captured, and filled your soul by the special, passionate, powerful symphonic masterpieces of Arnold Schoenberg in their impact on the listener, then you have joined the music that is called eternal .
This summer night, daughter of nights,
overheard by me,
Tormented, over-forgotten
love nights,
Where do I sleep - in the present?
Or am I floating above myself?

The poetic lines of David Shrayer-Petrov floated above me along with Schoenberg’s “Enlightened Night,” a romantic (it was even called hyper-romantic) string sextet, which I heard here in New York in one of the huge halls of Lincoln Center. This sextet, like most of Schoenberg’s works, is distinguished by incredible emotional tension, bubbling expression, causing a response nervous surge, as if assuring us: love, devotion, humanity will still triumph over evil. The composer's musical images are so powerful that it seems that we see how his lovers on an enlightened night have wings and they take off and rush among the stars.
“The Great Austrian,” as Schoenberg is called in his native country, was the pioneer of atonal music, one of those who stood at the forefront of the renewed musical culture of the 20th century, that is, modern music. Probably, it was precisely this - inflexibility before the canons, the absolute revolutionary nature of symphonic, and therefore artistic thinking, genuine intelligence alloyed with the highest decency - that became the foundation on which a building of marvelous architecture was built, no, rather a temple of Schoenberg’s many years of the strongest creative and human friendship with the great Russian artist, founder of expressive abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky.
There is an old, old Russian proverb: “God knows who he’s fending off” - both in love and in friendship too. Surely it was a higher power that brought Kandinsky on January 2, 1911 to the Munich concert hall, where he first heard Schoenberg’s music and realized that it was inexplicably consonant with his painting, as if the sounds, having materialized, acquired color and lay on the canvas, or, conversely, picturesque images, born of the artist’s painful thoughts, ascended to the sky with the inviting sounds of the music of the inspired composer.
This is how their acquaintance took place, which gave impetus (“probably underground,” Kandinsky himself defined) to a very close friendship and an interesting intellectual dialogue - many years of correspondence between the two great people. So different - a musician and a painter, a Russian and an Austrian, an Orthodox Christian and a Jew, and so similar - brave, daring experimenters, disdainful of human opinion and rumor, indifferent to momentary success and money, fearless and persistent in their convictions. For real men, both in creativity and in the lives of both, the masculine principle was dominant. They created in parallel worlds: Schoenberg exploded tonal music and fled from traditional harmony, Kandinsky rejected both pictorial perspective and traditional presentation and form of image. They, the composer and the artist, not only deeply understood each other, but also supported, approved, and often complemented, even initiated revolutionary breakthroughs in the changing, constantly renewed creativity of each.
Therefore, it is not surprising that art historians at the New York Jewish Museum (the one on the corner of 5th Avenue and 92nd Street) have combined in one exhibition the intersecting destinies and creations of these two great people.
If Schoenberg “fell in love” with music as a child, began playing, composing and showed his talent as a symphonist very early, just as incredibly early he “swallowed the conductor’s baton” (as they jokingly say about gifted conductors), then Kandinsky, like Van Gogh and Gauguin, came to professional painting in adulthood, after thirty, and his temptation to modernism was not a youthful desire to test himself, to hack everything that exists, but a conscious turn to new artistic achievements - to the creation of abstract art, the existence of which he substantiated not only by his painting practice , but also theoretically.
By the way, what is avant-garde? In fine and applied arts, music, theater, architecture? “Such a historically specific phenomenon in the development of culture,” encyclopedias define, “the characteristic feature of which is the discovery of new means, methods and forms of artistic thinking.” You couldn't say it more clearly. And, of course, the most important thing, the main thing here, was the creative individuality, the ability of the master, through his method, his artistic manner and style, to express the spiritual values, the spiritual atmosphere of his contemporary era. Speaking about spirituality, Kandinsky emphasized that “it is associated with the expression of the inner world of man, which is most adequately revealed in non-objective forms, since objectivity is spiritless vulgar materialism,” and the era of new art means its movement towards “the unnatural, the abstract and the inner nature.” .
Actually, the starting point of abstract art was Kandinsky’s first “non-representational” watercolors, which we see at the exhibition. Then, in the second decade of the 20th century, apocalyptic motifs and a premonition of the end of the world began to appear in the artist’s paintings. Was this not a brilliant vision of future catastrophes - bloody wars, revolutions, fascism, the Gulag era, the death of millions? How eloquent, how they appeal to our feelings, how they mobilize the will are Kandinsky’s masterpieces “Watercolor with a Red Spot”, the lithograph “Orange”, the famous “Composition II” with its phallic symbols and the prediction in plain text: “Fear troubles and death! They are coming! And his greatest works in terms of intensity of tragedy are compositions VI and VII. Their lines move along the surface of the canvas in smooth curves, interacting, they collide with each other, change their direction, break or intersect, and form certain combinations. Spots and lines act like living beings, which enhances and reveals the inner essence and expressiveness of the event, acquiring the character of universality, and this tragedy contains not only elements of purification, but also the harmonious development of seemingly insoluble contradictions. This is the genius of Wassily Kandinsky, who managed to create such an absolutely new reality, in which we can feel the entire complex spiritual world of our contemporary, filled with great upheavals, and the choir of colors in his color music, a choir consisting of many voices, sounds powerful and excited.
But Schoenberg also wrote precisely multicolor color music, only Kandinsky’s weapons were line and color, and Schoenberg’s were sound. And the ideological orientation is also the same: evil is coming, but good will win. It is interesting that in both fascist Germany and the Soviet Union, Kandinsky’s paintings, like Schoenberg’s works, were classified as degenerate art, were slandered and banned, were not exhibited, and were not performed. Accordingly, we practically did not know them, so everything that we will see and hear in the Jewish Museum will be new to us, and especially Schoenberg’s paintings.
It was a real discovery for me that the great composer Arnold Schoenberg was also a very interesting original artist. Truly, the world of the human soul is inexhaustible.
The wonderful poet Viktor Urin has the following lines:

Unpredictable speeds boil:
distances from alloy to disintegration,
distances from “should” to
"No need",
distance from lips to lips,
distances from faith to irreligion.
And winning torments us with loss,
if pretending to be wide
smiling -
We are getting darker.
Both friends had many reasons to become gloomy in depth: two deadly world wars, and in the years between them also bringing death and horror - revolutions, hunger, cold, the race to the yawning heights in Russia, Nazism in Germany, the Anschluss in Austria. Both had to leave their native countries: Kandinsky - Russia (in 1921 forever), Schoenberg - to flee to the USA. Both of them had a hard time with it all. And there was no harmony in their personal lives, although again both were monogamous by nature, but fate decreed otherwise. Kandinsky's late marriage was a true misfortune, implicated in the absurdity, greed, stupidity and infidelity of his wife, whom he loved painfully and strongly, although he knew her worth. And Schoenberg loved his Matilda madly, even when she left him for the artist Richard Herzl, abandoning her two children. Then, as if nothing had happened, she returned. And he accepted, he was only upset by Herzl’s suicide. Lord, what passions were raging, what women - Matilda Schoenberg, Alma Mahler, who recklessly cheated on her husband Gustav, another great Austrian composer and conductor, and her lover, the great artist Oskar Kokoschka, too. So the title “great” does not save you from dislike and betrayal.
When Matilda died (she was not even forty), Schoenberg wrote his famous symphonic “Waiting,” and Kandinsky responded with a coloristic crescendo. No, the composer did not mourn until the end of his days; after some time he married again. In addition, bisexuality invaded his life: Alban Berg, and then other young musicians filled his life and appeared on his canvases. But the most interesting thing, in my opinion, in Schoenberg’s paintings is a series of his self-portraits. Like a calendar of his life. Who can tell more fully, deeply and mercilessly about himself than the artist himself, and Schoenberg had two paths, two possibilities: his music and his paintings. He repeated “Waiting” on the canvas. And his most significant and most tragic self-portrait was and remains that full-length portrait, where he walks along an endless dull road, and we, seeing only his stooped back, understand: this is a path to nowhere. The plastic is amazing.
And one more painting that we can’t help but mention: “Red Look.” Nightmare. A portrait of fascism that came two decades later. Prophecy of a genius?
The publication of the almanac “The Blue Rider” was Kandinsky’s idea. In this magazine, he and his associates embodied the entire spectrum of emotions, desires, and visions of the world and man that were raging in their brains and hearts. There were literary and musical texts, drawings, lithographs, and political articles. The almanac also gave its name to the artistic association of avant-garde artists and followers of newborn expressionism. Its participants were Mark Kandinsky, Klee, Macke... Schoenberg was also involved. The importance of unification in the development of art of the 20th century can hardly be overestimated. The exhibition, which is called: “Kandinsky, Schoenberg and the Blue Rider,” displays works by the artists of the “Rider” (there were 14 of them): Franz Marc (his famous “Yellow Cow”), Gabrielle Munter, Robert Delano, Albert Bloch, Henri Rousseau, David Burliuk... As you can see, an internationalist who published one of the loudest modernist manifestos in the almanac.
Of course, the accusation of anti-Semitism against Kandinsky, whose words were distorted by Alma Mahler, was a slander, which Schoenberg angrily denied, and Kandinsky himself was offended to the core. "This is impossible!" - he said.
Unfortunately, the friendship of the two greats did not stand the test of old age. In 1936, Kandinsky wrote his last letter to Schoenberg.
"Spirituality from the very roots." This is what Oskar Kokoschka said about the work of each of them. We are convinced of this by getting acquainted with their works.
You can get to the Jewish Museum by metro trains 4, 5, 6 to the “86 Street” stop. On Thursdays after 5, admission is free.
By the way, you will also see Dara Birnbaum’s stunning Schoenberg-inspired television installation “Waiting.” On December 7 at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center at 5 o'clock you can attend a concert in which Schoenberg's "Enlightened Night" will be performed, and on December 16 at 8:00, December 20 at 1:30 and December 23 at 7:30 at the Metropolitan opera" will be given the only opera by Arnold Schoenberg "Moses and Aaron".

"Verklärte Nacht" ("Enlightened Night"), op. 4 (1899) by Arnold Schoenberg, performed by People's Artist of Russia, conductor Wolf Gorelik and the GAMT Orchestra. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. The concert took place on July 26, 2011.

Tannhäuser: Listen to this wonderful Sextet, written by the composer even before he invented the famous dodecaphone system. That is, in a completely “classical” format. Below I quote the text from http://intoclassics.net, which will help you better understand the work of the outstanding Austrian and American composer , teacher, musicologist, conductor.

The sextet “Enlightened Night”, written in 1899 based on the poem “Woman and World” by Richard Demel, clearly continues the line of late romanticism. The Sextet's literary source material contains typical subjects of the romantic era: a woman and a man; Moonlight night; delight in the beauty of nature.

The Sextet's composition is interesting. Formally, the composer writes a sonata Allegro. But at the same time it follows the content of the text in detail, sometimes allowing very significant deviations from the scheme. The same internal schematicism will appear later in Schoenberg and in his dodecaphonic compositions. Richard Dehmel wrote to Schoenberg that, while listening to "The Enlightened Night" in concert, he tried to follow the motives of his text, but soon forgot about it, being enchanted by the music.
The origins of Schoenberg's music are in the late romantic art of R. Wagner, A. Bruckner, R. Strauss and G. Mahler. Such influences are so obvious that critics often overlook three other important qualities of Schoenberg's style that are antithetical to the Romantic tradition. Firstly, the late Romantics developed their musical thoughts in a dense, rich harmonic fabric, while Schoenberg, with the exception of a few early works (for example, the Songs of Gurre, Gurrelieder, for soloists, three choirs and orchestra, 1910-1911), preferred a laconic presentation of the idea, without unnecessary repetition, and a clear, clearly audible texture. Secondly, Schoenberg had a positive way of thinking, and therefore even his most romantic works (such as the early sextet Enlightened Night, Verklarte Nacht, op. 4) are distinguished by their logical development and structural clarity. Thirdly, Schoenberg’s polyphonic technique is characterized by confidence and virtuosity, which brings him closer not to the romantics mentioned above, but rather to J. Brahms.

Listeners in few cities in the world can boast that in the course of one season they witnessed three concerts by outstanding conductors dedicated to their anniversaries (which in themselves already make a stunning impression). On the stage of the Great Hall, behind the console, stood the teacher of Yuri Temirkanov, Valery Gergiev, Vasily Sinaisky and a whole galaxy of other wonderful conductors, ninety-year-old Ilya Aleksandrovich Musin and his first student, eighty-five-year-old Odysseus Achillesovich Dimitriadi.

The legendary Carlo Maria Giulini also celebrated his eightieth birthday with a concert in this hall. The maestro's strict aristocratic appearance, conducting by heart, without a score, the habit of standing on stage at the same level as the orchestra - everything indicated that the listeners had a rare opportunity to meet the master of the old European conducting school. But Giulini is by no means a “museum relic”; the first bars of the Second Symphony convinced us of this. His clear, laconic, somewhat restrained gesture involuntarily attracts the eye, his powerful strong-willed principle subjugates both listeners and orchestra members. Unfortunately, the Philharmonic Orchestra is going through hard times now - which was felt even that evening. The lack of coherence, inexpressive solos and, most importantly, the loss of former sonority were especially noticeable in Brahms' Fourth. And yet the concert was one of the most significant for the first composition of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic this season. The audience vigorously welcomed the musicians, and the grateful mayor of the city repeatedly appeared on stage with offerings - sometimes with a huge basket of flowers, sometimes with a bronze figurine of the mythological Roman she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus.

A day earlier, Yuri Bashmet's chamber orchestra "Moscow Soloists" met the same crowded hall when it came to St. Petersburg for the first time. Bashmet is becoming a living legend before our eyes. Perhaps never before has a violist reached such a high place in the unspoken performing hierarchy. Creating orchestras, conducting, artistic direction of a television program, a festival - all this, it seemed, should have influenced the performing qualities. But not Bashmet, and St. Petersburg residents were convinced of this while listening to Schnittke’s Monologue for viola and string orchestra and the viola solo in the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto. Bashmet knows how to spiritualize pure musical structures, saturate them with deep emotional content, without ever falling into excess. However, it is difficult to talk about Bashmet the conductor in a technical aspect. Behind the podium of the Moscow Soloists is a brilliant musician with a keen sense of form and style, but most of all, an exceptional personality, influencing the orchestra and the audience by his very presence. The “soloists” are distinguished by a huge ensemble culture, special training and, on this basis, perhaps, still limited freedom.

The real highlight of the orchestra's tour was Schoenberg's "Enlightened Night", performed with such unclouded clarity that at times it seemed as if you were hearing this famous work for the first time. In the mid-forties, Alexei Remizov wrote down in his diary his feelings from Schoenberg’s music heard on the radio: “a new combination of sounds and a new sound... It’s a feeling: an explosion and a new sky.”

The debut of the young team in St. Petersburg was a big event. The orchestra also participated together with the Tchaikovsky Youth Chamber Orchestra in a large charity concert for the fund of the Virtuosi 2000 program, which provides support to young musicians.