Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME) chamber concert NO WORDS

The festival programme of the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME) is a short overview of the ways modern composers work with verbal text. The ensemble focuses on different tactics of interaction between the text, the soloist, and instrumentalists, as well as different types of texts set to music in the compositions of the leading authors of the generation of 50–year-olds. The three works performed by MCME form a paradoxical narrative about love and death. In this narrative, "high" and "low" genres have equal say, tension is softened by irony, and kitsch turns into palpitating lyrics.

Alexey Sysoev – a Moscow-based radical composer with a background of a jazz pianist, a taste for experimental electronics and non-academic vocals – appears as the author of a 2018 composition in which a baritone and an instrumental ensemble perform traditional solo and accompanying roles. It is the text that is unconventional here. Mon aimée, ma belle Irène is the full text of the suicide letter of the Russian poet and ethnographer, a member of the French Resistance Boris Vilde from a German prison, in which the expectation of execution is comprehended from the perspective of eternity and love: "Death for me is the realization of Great Love, it is entering the true reality."

The cycle of the Cypriot composer, musicAeterna resident Andreas Moustoukis set to the verses of Guillaume Apollinaire (premiered at St. Petersburg Dom Radio in February 2023) "dresses" classical poems about the autumn of the French avant-gardist, anarchist, aesthete, and founder of surrealism in a non-academic electronic percussion sound shell: "Leaves / Trampled as one / A train / That rolls on / Life / Is gone".

In the composition of the famous Russian-German composer, a member of the group SoMa Vladimir Rannev, This is Such a Love (2014), an anonymous text from the collection "Handwritten Girl's Story" by sociologist Sergey Borisov appears on the video screen, while the soloist only sighs along with the instrumental ensemble in time with the running lines, "singing over" the motives of Romeo and Juliet in a new way: «Victor fell to his knees. He throbbed, kissed Lena's portrait, but it was not enough, in the name of love he took out poison and drank it. “I'm sorry, Lena, I'm sorry for my negligence, I'm sorry for my incomplete love, Lena! I am dying in your name..."».