“For me music represents a means of getting in touch with the absolute, to attain what I would term approaching to the Whole”.

 

Sergey Belimov

                                                         

 

Sergey Belimov (1950)

 

 

6 concertos for soloists and orchestra

 

1 “Of Water Alive and Dead” (1987) 7’43

                        Yu. Rimas oboe, USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra, G. Rozhdestvensky conductor

2 “El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan“ (J. L. Borges) [The Garden of diverging paths] (1991)       11’44

                 R. Fabbriciani flute, St. Petersburg Chamber Orchestra, R. Martynov conductor

3 Concerto for cello and strings orchestra (2000) 12’05

                 J. P. Dessy cello, Orchestre royal de Wallonie, J. P. Dessy conductor

4 “Multicordes” for cordepiano solo and an orchestra of 31 cordepianos (2003) 12’42

                 E. Merx, S. Belimov cordepiano and tape

5 “Fyodor Dostoevsky. Âñÿêàÿ ìóõà — òàéíà“ [Every fly is a mystery] (2004) 15’10

                G. Boukoff reciter, St. Petersburg Philarmonic Brass Quintet, F. Lednyov conductor, tape

6 “Chant sépulcral” à la mémoire de ma mère Eugénia Loukhina (2003) 13’55

                D. Kientzy saxophones, Romanian  Radio Chamber Orchestra, L. Bács conductor

 

 

 

Performers:

 

Juozas Rimas

Gennady Rozhdestvensky

Roberto Fabbriciani

Ravil Martynov

Jean-Paul Dessy

Elizabeth Merx

Georges Boukoff

Fyodor Lednyov

Daniel Kientzy

Ludovic Bács

 


______________________________________

 

WHY CORDEPIANO?

The piano is the computer of the 18th century. This instrument is perfect. It is a too well-tempered clavier.

Attempts to decomputerize the piano were already made in the 20th century. In the 40’s Henry Cowell and John Cage began to “prepare” it, artificially modifying the instrument’s timbre. Yet even after Cage’s “revolution” the piano kept its percussionist nature of producing sounds and the discontinuity of the sound scale.

       Some years ago composer Sergey Belimov discovered special techniques which extend the piano’s timbre scope, allow to go beyond the barrier of uniform temperation, choose for each sound an individual type of attack and release and produce microintervals, flageolets and multiphonics without any additional electronic equipment.

       The discovery of these techniques inspired Sergey Belimov and Elizabeth Merx to form the Cordepiano duet.

 

 

 

 "In Belimov's music we have heard a real philosophy of sound. Belimov sets his performers a hard task, and musicians are often embarassed when having to produce his raw sounds. He goes to the length of transcribing the process of waking in his scores, by means of imperceptible modulations around the initial sound".

Xavier Flament, “Le soir” Bruxelles, 27-28 mai 2000

 

 

Sergey Belimov

 

When I was born in 1950, Schoenberg, Prokofyev, Honegger and Ives were still active, and Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Sergei Slonimsky were beginning to study composition in conservatoires in Paris, Cologne and Leningrad respectively; John Cage had already invented prepared piano, but had not yet written his concerto for prepared piano and strings, so that the great Giacinto Scelsi could by no means have heard it and continued to play the same note on the piano for hours on end, listening attentively to fading resonances, and on Sundays a gamelan orchestra was playing in Denpasar on Bali.

Noise, music and silence alternated in my life from 1950 till now in 2005 when I am writing this. Gradually the noise has been increasing, and the silence getting less. Fortunately the music is still there. I have had the chance to listen to Scelsi’s music and the songs of South Kazakh shamans, kemancha music in Azerbaidzhan and duduk music in Armenia, vedas being recited in India, muezzins’ cries in Egypt and Tunis, to talk with Avet Terteryan and John Cage and on a Sunday to play in a gamelan orchestra on Bali.

    In the intervals between listening, talking and playing I managed sometimes to penetrate into silence and then to record what I had heard there. At times I could catch just the basic cell out of which all the rest would grow: I heard the oboe concerto in Repino in the winter 1987, the flute concerto in the deafening noise of Sadovoye Koltso in Moscow in 1990, the cello concerto in 2000 near my house, close by the Bois de Vincennes, the saxophone concerto in 2002 on the Pont Neuf in Paris, and “Every fly is a mystery” in our friends’ kitchen in Florence in 2004. I do not know exactly when and where I first heard “Multicordes” — maybe a couple of months before my birth and maybe towards the end of the 80’s, but then it made no sense to “create” this work because the instrument did not exist at the time. And the conventional piano, even prepared in Cage’s manner, still could not produce a continuous sound, play microintervals and change its timbre. Hence I had to invent. It is a pity that I did that only in 1996, after Scelsi had died. I think he would have been happy about it.



The meaning of the term concerto in Latin is not only competition, as the 18th century classics taught us, but unity, agreement, consensus, and in music it means harmony, holistic unity of everything.

 

In the concertos recorded on this CD (although the solo parts in them were composed for such highly skilled musicians as Juozas Rimas (oboe), Roberto Fabricciani (flute), Jean-Paul Dessy (cello), Daniel Kientzy (the only one to play all the 7 kinds of saxophone), the actor Georges Boukoff, the world’s first cordepiano player Elizabeth Merx), the thing that matters most is not a virtuosity competition between these musicians and the conductors Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Ravil Martynov or Fyodor Lednyov.

The spirit of this music, as it seems to me, is altogether different, and this is how one should listen to it:

 

1.      Insert the disc into your CD player,

2.      Swith off the light. Settle snugly in an armchair or on a sofa.

3.      Before listening, try to concentrate on the surrounding silence (I hope such a thing is still possible).

4.      Press the button of the remote. Music will come into existence.

5.      Do not listen to it. All you need is to listen a little to yourself.

 

It is not recommended to listen to this CD

 

a)     in a car,

b)     in a train,

c)      near oil drills in operation,

d)     if children younger than three are around (this does not apply to cats and dogs: they can listen).

 

 

Since he was born three years before Stalin-Dzhugashvili’s death, in an era of unbounded optimism, the author is so naive as to believe that at the moment when you will listen to this CD (and particularly if this happens on a Sunday), a gamelan orchestra will still be playing in Denpasar on Bali.