Alexander Knaifel - Psalm 51 (50)

composer: Alexander Knaifel
performer: Mstislav Rostropovich (cello)
date written: 1995
recording date: 2001

Néhány info angolul:

"At the beginning of the 1960s, the St Petersburg-based composer Alexander Knaifel (born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1943) was part of the geographically-scattered avant-garde of the Soviet Union, and a friend and contemporary of composers Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Edison Denisov, all then active in Moscow, as well as Arvo Pärt in Tallinn, Giya Kancheli in Tiflis, and Valentin Silvestrov in Kiev. A remarkable generation of musicians, highly supportive of each other, yet each with a uniquely defined sound-world. Knaifel's music in this early period was intensely expressive and attested to the influence both of Shostakovich and the Second Vienna School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern."

"In the 1970s, Knaifel's compositional style changed, became more inward looking, with a greater economy of musical means, and by the 1990s the emphasis was most often on works on religious themes, "occupying a territory between philosophy, psychology and the esoteric".
Knaifel now spoke of sounds as "signs of the existence of beauty" defining beauty as "energy, unrepeatable"."

"For his latest New Series album, Alexander Knaifel collaborates with incomparable cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on "Psalm 51 (50)"

"Knaifel points out that Psalm 51(50) has been held by some commentators to be the most comprehensive expression of emotion "in the entire Book of Psalms, and I had this feeling that only Rostropovich could articulate this text." Rostropovich is called upon to "sing" the Russian translation of the text, articulating it "syllable by syllable" through the medium of the cello. In a similar spirit the instrumentalists of the State Hermitage Orchestra are also instructed to "'sing out' the spiritual texts" in "Amicta Sole", "as if they are literally being sounded aloud"."

Category:

Music

Tags:

• alexander
• knaifel
• mstislav
• rostropovich
• cello
• psalm
• 51
• (50)
• psychedelic

[sunmosphere]

amicta sole (clothed with the sun), too. please!