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PERSEPHONE (Stravinsky) Perm 2023 Teodor Currentzis, Aisylu Mirhafizkhan, Egor Semenkov
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Perséphone
- Composer: Stravinsky Igor, Teodor Currentzis
- Libretto: André Gide
- Venue & Opera Company: Shpagin Plant, House of Music, Perm, Russia, Diaghilev Festival
- Recorded: July 2, 2023
- Type: Concert Semi-staged
- Singers: Aisylu Mirhafizkhan, Egor Semenkov
- Conductor: Teodor Currentzis
- Orchestra: musicAeterna
- Chorus: musicAeterna Choir, "Vesna" Children's Choir
- Chorus Master: Anna Guseva
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Diaghilev Festival
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, rusubs
- This Recording is NOT AVAILABLE from a proper commercial or public source
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Program
Symphony of Psalms for Choir and Orchestra (1930, second edition 1948)
Persephone, a melodrama for speaker, soloists, choir, dancers and orchestra based on a libretto by André Gide (1933)
Introduction to the play “Persephone. Symphony of Psalms”
based on the poem by Theodor Currentzis “In the month of Anthesterion”
and a fragment from the tragedy of Aeschylus “Prometheus Chained”
Composer: Teodor Currentzis
Stravinsky calls “Perséphone” a melodrama, but it’s not about a sentimental love story – rather, he means a special form of “reading to music”, a common practice at the beginning of the 20th century. From a theatrical point of view, this is a composition of a mixed genre, which combines singing and recitation, an antique choir and lullabies, pantomime and statuesque mise en scene. “Perséphone” was created by order of Ida Rubinstein as a ballet – but it does not resemble the usual dance performances. Its syncretic form refers rather to the “ballets” of Monteverdi’s time, in which there was sometimes much more singing than dancing.
In “Perséphone” Stravinsky yet again composes the ritual of spring – albeit not exactly the same as in “The Rite of Spring”. Here the music is softer and more lyrical, the orchestra rarely plays in full force, and the myth underlying the plot is not Proto-Slavic, but Antique. Greek mythology and culture in general are extremely important for Stravinsky: resurrecting the pre-Romantic artistic ideal in his work, he restores the attitude to the Antiquity as a model, a living practice, and not as history.
In Stravinsky’s and Andre Gide’s version, Persephone turns out to be a proto-Christian figure – a child of the gods who voluntarily descended into the underworld out of pity for the souls suffering there and resurrected to a new life under the final stanzas of the choir, in the text of which researchers see references to the parable of the wheat grain from the Gospel of John (12:24). Into the image of Persephone, doomed to wander between two worlds, Stravinsky could also put the personal experiences of an artist standing (like all artists) on the border between aesthetic pleasure in an ivory tower and the bitter reality of daily human suffering.