HIDDEN (St. Petersburg)

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME) and sound designers Serge Lemouton and Luca Bagnoli (IRCAM, Paris) perform HIDDEN - composition for string quartet and electronics by Chaya Czernowin (USA/Israel).

The performance of HIDDEN will be prefaced with a public talk by music critic Alexey Munipov and IRCAM sound designers Serge Lemouton and Luca Bagnoli.

HIDDEN is an attempt to get at what is hidden underneath expression or underneath music. It attempts to reach even further where there is a barely audible presence, which is on the edge of our perception. We do not know this presence, and it might be foreign, undecipherable. HIDDEN is a very slow moving 45 minute experience transforming the ear into an eye. The ear is given space and time to observe and orient itself in the unpredictable aural landscape. It is an underwater, submerged landscape of rocks, inhabited by low vibrations which are felt rather than heard and with layers and layers of peeling away fog. Monolithic groups of sonic ‘rocks’ are seen/ heard from various angles. The piece is about observation; it tries to trace/ perceive/sense the emergence of expression.

Chaya Czernowin is a composer, and Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University. She is the lead composer at the Schloß Solitude Sommerakademie, a biannual international academy of composers and resident musicians at the landmark Schloß Solitude, in Stuttgart. Czernowin’s output includes chamber and orchestral music, with and without electronics. Her works has been regularly played in most of the contemporary music festivals in Europe, as well as in Japan, Korea, Australia, the USA and Canada. Czernowin has received numerous awards for her compositions, including the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1992), Asahi Shimbun Fellowship Prize (1993), the Schloß Solitude Fellowship (1996), the IRCAM Reading Panel (1998), the Composer’s Prize by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2003), the Rockefeller Foundation Prize (2004), the Fromm Foundation Award (2008), a nomination of the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg (2008), the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2011) and the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis (2016). She was Artist in Residence with the Salzburg Festival in 2005/06 and with the Lucerne Festival, Switzerland in 2013.

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME) was founded in 1990 by Yuri Kasparov, under the patronage of the famous Russian composer Edison Denisov. The ensemble focuses on promoting 20th and 21st century music. It is Russia’s foremost contemporary chamber ensemble and consists of some of the best Russian musicians specializing in modern music. The ensemble’s repertoire is quite extensive and has included the premiere of almost 1000 different works. MCME regularly performs in many diverse locales across Russia (80 cities) and elsewhere in the world (28 countries). MCME has collaborated with the leading composers of the world, Iannis Xenakis, György Kurtág, Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, Beat Furrer, Klaus Lang, Philippe Leroix, Mark Andre, Enno Poppe are among them.

Public talk starts at 19.00 and is free of charge, online registration is required.

The concert starts at 19.00. Tickets (350 RUR) are available at Alexandrinsky Theater box-office or online.