On September 30, the SOUND UP festival will open the concert season at the most fashionable show of contemporary art in the capital, Cosmoscow. Especially for this event, the curators prepared an extraordinary premiere in fusion style: for the first time, composer Simeon ten Holt’s play “Canto ostinato” will be performed by an orchestra of Russian folk instruments.

The special project SOUND UP is dedicated to the centenary anniversary of the Dutch minimalist Simeon ten Holt. He went down in the history of academic music as a composer who brought back nostalgia for the romantic. The quiet revolution of an ascetic and provincial born in a Dutch village had been brewing for decades: ten Holt found his unique style when he was over fifty.

Turning to the rehearsal technique, ten Holt began to compose gigantic minimalist canvases, including his magnum opus “Canto Ostinato”.

In contrast to the mechanical, cold American minimalism, ten Holt’s music is haunted by the ghosts of a sentimental past. “Canto ostinato” is a pure tonality, repetitions of short motives, gradually developing into continuous singing, which is reflected in the title of the work. The time of “singing” is determined only by the performer himself; a concert lasting more than a day is considered a record. Ten Holt himself said that echoes of repressed memory are always heard in tonal music, so his song is like a ritual spell, an attempt to appeal to the romantic era.

The composer does not specifically indicate on which instruments “Canto ostinato” should be performed. The piece became a hit among pianists and drummers around the world, but the curators of SOUND UP, avoiding template solutions, decided to score the score with Russian folk instruments. The author of the new version will be Moscow composer and pianist Igor Yakovenko.

In his work, Yakovenko connects the seemingly distant worlds of academic music and jazz. While his scores are performed on philharmonic and theater stages, he performs in the capital’s clubs as a jazz pianist and leader of his own group. The composer’s multipolar art is well illustrated by his discography on the Fancymusic label, the main publisher of domestic innovative music, which has already released seven Yakovenko albums. The new joint project with SOUND UP will be a creative experiment in the synthesis of traditional music and academic minimalism, the recognizable style of ten Holt and the author’s style of Yakovenko.

The musicians of the Belgorod Academic Russian Orchestra under the direction of conductor Evgeny Aleshnikov will undertake to bring this daring idea to life. The team does not limit itself to one style, cooperates fruitfully with modern authors and proves that the sound of folk instruments is still relevant today. The premiere of the SOUND UP festival will take place on the second day of the Cosmoscow fair, in the Forum pavilion of the world famous Expo Center.