Devotio Moderna, CENTER OF DEVELOPMENT AND SUPPORT OF NEW MUSIC


 

Out of the light

Tully Potter

Photos from Tully Potter Collection


Interviewing Tatiana Grindenko Is a little like getting to know one of those Russian dolls that opens to reveal, each time, a smaller doll Inside. I do not think I got through even to the third doll, much less to the innermost one - which, I suspect, is very small and wears a rather apprehensive expression. One of her personas is deeply serious, another Is very merry, with a scintillatingly spontaneous smile. The various Grindenko dolls even favour different kinds of music-making. One of them forms half of one of the world's great violin duos with Gidon Kremer, Grlndcnko's former husband. Another, not very active recently, gets kicks from playing in a rock group. Another is devoted to performing modern music but wears a mask so as to keep her own personality out of the equation as much as possible. Yet another plays Baroque music on period instruments.
Photo from Tully Potter Collection You could say that the outermost shell - the violinist who made such an Impression on us 3O years ago - has been shed like a cast-off skin. Certainly Grindenko feels that she has died and been reborn, both spiritually and artistically. What has emerged Is still a first-rate violinist but one more or less free of the ego that seems to drive most of her colleagues. That she is not free of a performer's tensions, however, was proved only recently when she peppered the rehearsal room of an Italian theatre with bullets from an air pistol she had bought In the US. The artist who hates headlines found herself making them all over the world.
Our interview itself, which takes place in Hannover, has something of the Russian doll syndrome about it. First she sits me down in her hotel room while she, also seated - 'I prefer to play Bach sitting down' -performs the D minor Partita from a facsimile of Bach's manuscript. For this absorbing rendition she uses no (her Vuillaume violin wiih its modern set-up but her 1737 Tyrolean fiddle, in its original smic suitable for Baroque music, and a Baroque bow. The second stage is slightly surreal, as we sit in the hotel foyer with another great violinist, Wanda Wilkomirska, translating for us. After that we have a third session with another interpreter. What follows, then, is composed of fragments from a fleeting encounter with a remarkable but rather fugitive artist.
Grindenko was born on 29 March 1946 in Kharkov, the Ukraine. Her mother was a doctor and her father an army officer: both were atheists who converted to the Orthodox Church, and Tatiana's brother Anatoly, four years younger, went on to head a remarkable Orthodox singing group. At five Tanya started dancing lessons but her ballet teacher noticed how Photo from Tully Potter Collection musical she was and suggested she should learn the violin, 'l was never interested in the instrument itself,' she says. 'I played the violin because my parents wanted me to play the violin.' After six months with her first teacher, Abram Loslovicher - 'a marvel in dealing with beginners' - she was playing in a concert and at nine she performed Bach's A minor Concerto with orchestra. Not long after that, she played Wieniawski's D minor Concerto in public. At this stage she came to the attention of the Moscow pedagogue- Yuri Yankelevich: although, because of her age, he could not yet take her into his class, he urged the Grindenkos to let Tanya's talent be taken further. 'My parents moved to Leningrad because the best teachers were there,' she explains. At the school for gifted children attached to the Leningrad Conservatory, Grindenko's tutor was Boris Sergeyev, 'a very strict teacher' and a direct violinistic descendant of Auer through his own mentor Miron Polyakin. Although Grindenko benefited from Sergeyev's regime, the family found the Leningrad climate unhealthy and moved to Moscow. It was here that Grindenko found herself as an artist. During eleven years with Yankelevich, she changed her outlook and blossomed as a result.
'Yankelevich set me to practicing scales and exercises,' she told Mark Silberkvit for Book 9 of "The way They Play". 'It was then that my entire attitude to music and violin was reviewed. (...) 1 had been taught the Spohr Concerto no.9 as a sort of crude groundwork exercise. (...) But Yankelevich, phrase by phrase, revealed its beauties to me, so that I became fascinated with the work. Under him, I began to understand music, to truly "feel" the compositions I played.' The byword in the Yankelevich class was: 'The more you do at home, the more time you get at the lesson.' If she arrived ill prepared, she would be sent home at once; if she was on top of her homework, she might be given a three- or four-hour lesson. She also gained much from Yankelevich's fearsome but 'brilliant' assistant Maya Glezarova. Her war-horse at this time was Ernst's F sharp minor Concerto, which Yankelevich made her take seriously, and she loved playing violin duels, especially with fellow conservatory students Kremer and Victor Tretyakov.
In 1966 Grindenko married Kremer and, while remaining with her own teacher, was brought into the orbit of Kremer's preceptors David Oistrakh and Pyotr Bondarenko, both of whom influenced her development. In 1968 she won the Youth Festival competition in Sofia, Bulgaria and made her first tours abroad. She began winning prizes regularly Photo from Tully Potter Collection but, although she did well with fourth place in the I97O Tchaikovsky Competition, she was even more thrilled to get to know jurist Joseph Szigeti, who encouraged her in particular to explore Bartok. She then went through a dark night of the soul, from which she emerged in an unusual way for a Soviet citizen. Already she had been overwhelmed by Bach's B minor Mass and had realized that there was a vital spiritual dimension to music. Now, through her exact contemporary the composer Vladimir Martynov, she discovered music by such composers as Dufay and Ockeghem as well as underground and avant-garde music. She also found religion. 'I saw an icon of the Mother of God in a church - that was my point of conversion.'
1973 was a watershed for Grindenko. and one hesitates to probe too deeply into what must have been a traumatic time. First she won the gold medal at the Wieniawski Competition in Poznan, also scooping eight other prizes. Then, when she and Kremer were on tour in the West, he decided to defect. She returned home 'because I couldn't live in another country.' Then she married Martynov. All that in one year. When she turned 3O she looked back and felt she had somehow lost the ten best years of her life. For six years she and her husband played in a rock group called Boomerang: Martynov played keyboard and the composer Eduard Artemyev was also a member. 'There were seven or eight of us. Only three were classical musicians.' With her brother, the pianist Alexei Lubimov and the gambist Photo from Tully Potter Collection Oleg Hudyakov she had an early music group. She listened a lot to jazz, including Ella Fitzgerald, and admired the guitarist John McLaughlin, trying to play along with his records. She was also heavily involved in new music, by composers such as Cage and Silvestrov, which was frowned on by the authorities. 'Because of politics, avant-garde music was a crime in the Soviet Union. Avant-garde and authentic music created the same scandal.'
With Lubimov she might play Bach one day, Stockhausen the next, and in 1982 the two of them foundcd the Moscow Academy of Ancient Music -which, in spile of its name, divides its attention between old and new. In its repertoire it has a work called The Four Seasons - not the Vivaldi but a composite creation with Tso Chen Guan, Ivan Sokolov, Alexander Baksi and Martynov each contributing a section. Her group, Opus Posth, so named because she feels that when it was founded ten years ago 'my life staged again', plays radical, experimental and improvisational music in masks. 'We do not want individual people picked out. We want to take the facial expression out of the factor. It is not commercial music.We play electric violins.'
She has remained in artistic contact with Kremer and he always sounds at his best when performing with her: the purity of her playing and the sincerity of her artistry curb the Kremerisms which can be offputting when he is left to his own devices. In 1977 they made a record of the Bach 'Double' Concerto which will be an eternal reproach to his later gimmick of recording the work with himself - the version known to some as 'Kremer versus Kremer'. Many works have been composed for the Grindenko-Kremer partnership, Tabula Rasa by Part. 'Hay que caminar' sonando by Nono and various pieces by Schnittke being the best known. Martynov wrote 'Come in!' for them and they have recorded it together, but Grindenko prefers her more recent solo version on CCn'C Records - 'It is absolutely different from the Kremer.' She finds working in a studio very flat, saying, 'I try to be natural and do live recording.'
Although Grindenko still appears in public with Kremer, she now repudiates her previous life as a virtuoso, the life which gave rise to another famous record, her dazzling account of Bartok's solo Sonata, and her last big 'event', the 1989 first public performance of the concerto by the previously neglected composer Nikolai Roslavets. 'In the Soviet Union they always tried to be the best violinist, the best pianist et cetera. I think the Russian school has stopped; l feel like a dinosaur. When l look at young people who try to imitate someone, l think: all these little dinosaurs! Their time is ended.' She feels she has moved on but is not sure if anyone else will hear the difference. 'What changed in me was that l always tried to play the truth, l did what Yankelevich told me to Photo from Tully Potter Collection do but I always tried to aim for the truth.' She also tries to be 'natural' in concert, which is why she likes to be seated for the intimacy of Bach. 'When I play Brahms, I stand - I cannot get the spirit of Brahms sitting down. I will even change the programme if I feel different. if you are hot, you take off your coat; if you are cold, you put it back on.'
She is devoted to playing Baroque music on period instruments but does not want to teach it, even though there is only one teacher of Baroque violin in Moscow and the Conservatory has had such a department for only two years. 'A wise person will learn anywhere, a stupid person will not learn in any place.' She is sometimes doubtful about Bach performance. 'There are many people today who know all the rules, but there is another thing you cannot learn, and that is talent. You must forget about the rules, otherwise you will be like someone who learnt Russian perfectly at school but never spoke as a Russian. If a little child learns something gradually, that is authentic. Almost all those who say that they are playing authentically are usually foreigners.
You are authentic when you forget the rules, when you play how you feel, how you hear, how it sings in your ear. Talent equals freedom. I try to do what is natural to the music. Look at Gustav Leonhardt. There is something free-flowing and floating about his musicianship. Some achieve this just by getting old - they have to learn it. Authentic music can open a path to the future: what seems like looking back is actually looking to the future.'
Grindenko and her circle often seem to be looking both backward and forward: 'We had the idea of a concert dedicated to Bach, his harmonies and counterpoint.' Martynov has written a piece called Wohltemperierte Schonheit, a tribute to the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, and for the second half of the programme Pavel Karmanov - 'a genius composer' -has written Green DNK, based on Bach. The spirit of Bach is eternal beauty. This music has the feeling of greeting Bach, saying "Hello Mr. Bach". It is close to the freedom of Bach.'
Grindenko spends much of her time promoting the music of her husband, who apparently is writing a book saying 'that composition has come to an end'. Martynov's music can be banal to my ears but it can also often have a hypnotic, spiritual effect, as in his extended work Hymni, and he is clearly on the same wavelength as Part, John Tavener and the minimalists. 'l like Xenakis, Glass,' says Grindenko. 'For me Glass is sacred. I think Glass does not realise his music is sacred.' This quest for the sacred in art is the main driving force behind Grindenko today and she can seemingly find it in all sorts of musical situations. She remains the cultured person who loves Italian and Dutch 'old master' painting and classic Russian literature. I feel that if she knew why I wanted to interview her in the first place, she would think me a dinosaur. But I still consider her a fantastic violinist, in the tradition of Leonid Kogan, Julian Sitkovetsky and Oleg Kagan, and I am going to hang on to those great records of Bach and Bartok.

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metro Puschkinskaya, Tverskaya, Chekhovskaya
information - 299-2262


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from May 15 till 19
IN CONCERT STUDIO
M.Nikitskaya str., 24

organized by DEVOTIO MODERNA CENTER and RADIO CULTURE GTRK
composers Martynov, Batagov, Karmanov, Aigi, Zagny, Pelecis, Rabinovich, Semzo, Glass, Dresher and others performers Tatiana Grindenko, Galina Muradova, OPUS POSTH ensemble, Anton Batagov, Sergei Zagny, Alexey Aigi, 4.33 ensemble, Tibor Semzo, GORDIAN KNOT ensemble, ALKONOST choir and others

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