Portrait in music

by Petar PLAMENOV

7 April (Thursday), Grand Hall, 19:00
14 April (Thursday), Grand Hall, 19:00
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor: Alexei Kornienko, Austria
Soloist: Konstantin goddesses, France
Program: Works by Rodion Shchedrin


Bulgaria Hall
Address:
Sofia, 1 Aksakov Str.
Working time: mon-sun 09:00–18:30
Phone: 02 987 76 56

On 16 December, last year the great Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin was celebrate his 79th birthday. To mark the occasion his music is being featured in many concerts around the world. And now Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra in two consecutive concerts will perform the most important of his symphonic works.
 
Rodion Shchedrin was born on 16 December 1932 as the son of a composer and music teacher in Moscow. He attended the Moscow Choral School and subsequently studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Jurij Schaporin (composition) and Jakow Flier (piano), graduating with distinction in 1955. Despite his ability as a concert pianist, Shchedrin made the decision at an early stage to devote his career to composition and wrote his first ambitious works in his early twenties. In 1958, he married the prima ballerina Maja Plisetskaya. He experienced initial success as a composer with the premiere of his ballet “Carmen Suite” at the Moscow Bolschoi Theatre in 1967. He was professor for composition at the Moscow Conservatory between 1964 and 1969. In 1968, Shchedrin refused to sign an open letter in support of the invasion of troops from the Warsaw Pact into former Czechoslovakia. For over a decade, he was chairman of the Composers’ Association of the Russian Federation as the successor to Dmitri Shostakovitsch according to the latter composer’s expressive wish.




In 1982, he visited the festival Munich Piano Summer for the first time. Following the end of the dictatorial regime in the Soviet Union, it was finally possible for Shchedrin, who was never a member of the Communist Party, to participate intensively in international musical life. Since 1992, the composer has divided his time between Munich and Moscow. In 1992, the Russian President Boris Jelzin awarded the composer the State Prize for his choral work The Sealed Angel. A year later, Shchedrin received the Dmitri Shostakovitsch Prize and in 1995 the Crystal Award of the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 2002, he was named as Composer of the Year by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In the same year, he was presented with the Russian Federation State Order. In 2005, he was created as honorary professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and in 2008 at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Rodion Shchedrin was awarded the Russian State Order 2nd Class “for services to his country” in 2007.


Shchedrin has succeeded in combining traditional and new forms with the utilisation of all modern compositional processes – including aleatory and serial techniques. His enthusiasm for Russian folk music and classical music, poetry and literature permeates his works and characterises him as an originally Russian composer.

"I still today continue to be convinced that the decisive factor for each composition is intuition. As soon as composers relinquish their trust in this intuition and rely in its place on musical ‘religions’ such as serialism, aleatoric composition, minimalism or other methods, things become problematic" says confidently Rodion Shchedrin.

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