Overnight, Jewish-Russian composer Alexei Kurbatov’s life changed when he closed the door of his Moscow home and left on February 24, 2022. He crossed the border with his Ukrainian wife, son and three dogs. He realized that his life as a successful concert pianist and teacher at the Moscow Conservatory might change forever.

With him there are many millions of people who saw their life path change direction from the same moment and were forced to adopt the status of refugees. As with Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of his musical heroes, who also fled his native country for political reasons, Kurbatov’s feelings of displacement are reflected in his music.

Soon after arriving in his new environment in Montenegro, Amstel Quartet and Maria Nemtsova invited him to create a new work for them, and he composed Again Never Again: a poetic and equally disturbing reflection on the passage of time, its irreversibility, the inevitability of pain, and yet the hope always felt.

On Winteravonden aan de Amstel, the four saxophonists of Amstel Quartet and pianist Maria Nemtsova will play this eclectic composition in the H’ART museum, which contains elements of neoclassical, jazz & fusion, film music and academic symphonism. It was written for the unusual instrumentation of piano and saxophone quartet, which undergoes an enchanting sonic metamorphosis in a three-part suite. The timbre evolves from ‘jazz combo’ to, among other things, a retro-futuristic synthesizer orchestra. The suite is reminiscent of work by Kurbatov’s famous predecessors: ranging from Alexander Glazunov, who pioneered the saxophone quartet genre, to electronic soundtrack stars such as Eduard Artemyev and Vangelis, with whom Kurbatov previously collaborated. Due to the hypnotic, layered pulsations, the music has similarities with American minimalists and the masters of the Berlin School of electronic music from the 1970s: from Klaus Schulze to Tangerine Dream, but at the same time Kurbatov reveals an original, recognizable style of his own.