Fyodor Lednev conducts the world premiere of a new work by Valery Voronov.

Program

Valery Voronov (b. 1970) “Season of the phantasmal peace” (2024, world premiere) I. “Attraction” II. “Circles” III. “Veils”

Commissioned by the House of Culture “GES-2”

Dedicated to Fyodor Lednev and the Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music

Belarusian composer Valery Voronov often bases his compositions on literary texts – from Vladimir Sorokin in the early Omega Trumpet (2005) to Francesco Petrarch and Joseph Brodsky in the recent Acqua alta (2019).

Thanks to Brodsky, Voronov discovered the work of Derek Walcott, a poet and playwright, Nobel laureate, a native of the island state of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean Sea. In 1983, Brodsky dedicated an essay to him, “The Sound of the Surf,” in which he compared the epic power of Walcott’s poetry to the ocean.

Brodsky will develop this metaphor later in the preface to Walcott’s book of Swedish translations: “His poetry is truly oceanic. His lines, his stanzas come like waves, they also grow, rise, fall and, in the end, break. In the same sense they are life-giving, menacing, stunning, impenetrable, bizarre, rhetorical, transparent.”

This season lasted one moment, like the pause 

between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, 

but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

— Derek Walcott*

The poem “Season of the phantasmal peace” (1980) served as an impetus for the creation of a score of the same name, written by Valery Voronov, commissioned by the House of Culture “GES-2” especially for conductor Fyodor Lednev and the Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music. The scale of the tragic statement is intricately combined in the hour-long essay with the virtuoso sophistication of the letter: “His inkwell is a cornucopia of strophic constructions.”

This phrase from Brodsky about Walcott’s poetry could also describe Voronov’s music. The world premiere of “The Season of the Phantom World” develops and completes the conversation about the phenomenon of a large musical form as a way of creating a poetic picture of the world, which was shown in the concert program of the GES-2 House of Culture from September to December 2024.

“Then all the bird-peoples lifted up at once the vast network of earthly shadows and carried it away, chirping in innumerable dialects”—the three parts of the work, which are performed without interruption, refer to this key image of Walcott’s poem.

In “Attraction,” sound streams set the space around them in motion, change it, bend it—ultimately overcoming gravity, which causes sounds to either stay in an imaginary orbit or fall to the ground.

The second part, “Circles,” is the vibration of wings in the air, the acceleration of time horizontally. “The Veil” is an endless tension of strength, concentration on one thought, an attempt to avoid a catastrophe, using the last strength to hold on to something very fragile.