15 Jun2010

The Gallery of My Most Important Performances

Written by Asya Ardova. Posted in Contemplations

The gallery of my my most important performances

Actually Music and language were welded in one from my early childhood. That was because of my great thirst for beautiful mostly ample sounding expressions evoking vividity and reason. This is really the Reason searched by me in every expression of emotions.That's why I do insist there shouldn't be anything,but rational attitude to inculcate true aesthetic in any kind of art. I started my performances already in the kinder-garten, for to show everything I studied that time according to the music school programme.All the pieces I trained to lectures-concerts were making their composers familiar and bosom for me.I considered Bach, Beethoven and Grieg my old trusty friends, while Chopin became attainable for me only during the senior graduate years of school,when I was already 14. I always tried to comprehend the nature of my ‘friends-composers’ plunging into the epochs they lived, penetrating into the circumstances or moods, which ‘nursed’ their music.I constructed in my brain their supposed manner of speaking, intonations, voice and system of values. At last, when my programme was suffused with everything lofty and tender I had to demonstrate it in public concerts at enterprises and offices before tired workers,clerks and minor officials. However, soon I understood there was no difference between small fries and conservatoire professors - none of them were interested in music itself. It didn't stop my passion for the stage, for I know there do exist the pure true aesthetic concepts, known to the Highest Reason.

Surely, I will be able to narrate the consecutive history of my performances and to demonstrate the excerpts from my audio files, telling some useful educational information about the authors of the compositions executed by me once and recorded as to preserve most subtle but rather recognizable hints of my interpretation (this word embraces a lot for any artist). Actually, I never make any differences between the so-called modern music and early one.I mean, music is nothing more, but mere sounds endowed with special intonations peculiar for this or that cultural epoch, isn't it? Being green I enjoyed J. S. Bach, Chopin with his queer turns of melody (I can hardly call his music songful in the meaning of traditional bel canto).

However, my first acquaintance with modern complicated music was rather forced, when I was to learn the ‘Russian Song’ by the composer Nicolai Rakov, i.e. variations to the famous tedious melody. However, as far as I was mastering this piece, it seemed to transform into something unexpected, something that existed independently of its initial idea. My thirst for new incredible phonations was fully quenched in 1995, when Yuri Kornakov invited me to play the second piano's part in his suite ‘Lord of the Jungles’. What a pleasure it was for me. That was the first performance of the piano duet ‘Galina Ovsyankina - Asya Ardova’.

In 1996 I was appointed the secretary of the Association of Modern Music headed by the composer Gergiy Firtich.I had to conduct all the organizational work, arranging and hanging posters, agreeing about payments for executants,assisting them on the stage with listing pages at the instrument. Beside the concerts preparations one of my duties was to make oral commentaries during such gatherings. I was enthralled by avant-guarde indeed. I continued playing modern composers with Ovsyankina until December, 1997 - the gala concert of our legendary duet, which signed, meanwhile, the end of my piano ensemle landmark. My pure solo career started on December, 1996 with the Prelude and Fugue D minor by Dmitri Schostakovich. I remember my oral commentaries that evening, all that hustle and bustle connected with whimsical performers. I remember my ‘safe’ landing at the piano, reminding some refuge, when I started my music.