In the year 2018 renowned French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard shed light on the generally unknown and rarely performed Russian modernist composer Nikolai Obukhov by including his music in the program for a series of recitals in the United States. It is commendable that the pieces of Nikolai Obukhov, who is part of a forgotten avant-garde generation that was active in the early stages of the Soviet Union, were performed and shared by a pianist with such visibility. Aimard certainly managed to spark interest and curiosity amongst the audience, press, and classical music online forums concerning the music of this composer, which still has very little performance practice. As underlined in a review in The San Diego Union-Tribune: “Some composers, such as Nikolai Roslavets and Arthur Lourié, have been rediscovered, but Obukhov has yet to enjoy such a revival. Aimard’s performances of Création de l’or and Révélation may have been West Coast premieres.”1 Worth highlighting are the recordings dedicated solely to Obukhov’s piano solo music from Jay Gottlieb (2010) who has also performed in a series of concerts in Moscow in 2007 along with Nina Barkalaïa and who has continued to include Obukhov in his recital programs. In regard to Obukhov's orchestral music, it enjoyed a resurgence during the Holland Festival 2006 edition, with a performance of Le Troisième et dernier Testament for 5 voices, croix sonore, organ, 2 pianos and orchestra. Besides these efforts, the music of Nikolai Obukhov is still largely unexplored territory.
Born in 1892, Obukhov inherited not only some aspects of Alexander Scriabin’s musical language, but, most prominently, the philosophical ideas of Russian Symbolism as well. Described as “The strangest of these expatriate mystics”2 and as “Mystic Beyond Scriabin”3,Nikolai Obukhov stands out from his contemporaries as an intriguing figure. Like Scriabin, his musical aesthetic and language were so intricately connected with his religious and spiritual beliefs that they couldn’t be separated from one another. In an article for a special issue of the French magazine La Revue Musicale, Boris de Schloezer, a Russian musicologist, perfectly expressed this symbiosis between Nikolai Obukhov’s philosophical ideas and artistic practice:
(…) as he sees it music is only a mean; he does not hide it at all; but this means is identified with the goal he pursues, for he really sees all things only as sub specie musicae; these religious feelings, these philosophical ideas which he endeavors to express by means of his art - it is precisely this art which made him discover them - In one of his letters, Obouhow writes to me: ‘my main goal is not art ... art is just the basis...4
For the performer, the metaphysical substance of Obukhov’s musical work can reveal itself as a very rich source of inspiration in many ways.
Obukhov himself sometimes associated a musical idea with a mystical or religious symbolism, in much the same way as Skryabin thought of some of his sonatas as representing either evil or good. It is usually difficult or impossible for the listener to comprehend such associations, which are essentially outside the realm of music. They are by no means necessary for the enjoyment or understanding of the music—good music invariably stands on purely musical terms—but they can play an important part in the artist’s search for ideas that fire his imagination and spark the creative process.5
And indeed, in one particular aspect of Pierre-Laurent Aimard's series of concerts it is possible that this extra-musical meaning had some impact on his approach to the layout of the program. Obukhov’s piano pieces Révélation and Création d’or were played alongside those of Liszt, Messiaen and Scriabin, all of whom share resemblances not only in the treatment of sound and color, but also in dealing with spiritual and religious connotations in their music. By the choice of the pianist, the pieces from these composers merged into the first half of the program, with a request to the audience for no clapping between works. The outcome was a continuous and fluid succession of mystical soundscapes.
Besides this innovative aspect of the program, in his curational approach Pierre-Laurent did not go much further, confining Obukhov’s music to an otherwise traditional medium.By this I mean that Aimard performed under the traditional circumstances of what a “classical music concert” is expected to be. This format of the classical Western music concert comes from a performative tradition rooted in the bourgeois echelon of 19th century urban social circles. In the Western classical music industry today there are many ritualistic characteristics that define the general concert experience of a solo piano concert, such as: usually occurs in an auditorium/concert hall, the soloist performs works indicated on a program accessible to the audience, there is a specific starting time of the concert, after which usually it is not possible to get in, the audience has been allocated fixed sitting spots, and of course, silence, minimal movement and applause at the right moment are also part of the etiquette. Much more can be said about this concert format, but for now, this might be enough to build a picture.
Being a pianist myself and having in the past also performed music by Nikolai Obukhov, I started to wonder exactly what impact the extra-musical meaning of the music of such a composer could have on my approach to the performance of his piano works. In playing Obukhov’s works, should I just walk on stage, like in every other performance, and simply play? Or can there be more to it? By facing the philosophical mystical ideas of Obukhov as pillars for the construction of my performance, I want to see how far they can take me the creation of my artistic vision. My goal at the end of this research process is to have a clear vision of the final performance product, that I then can put in practice, as a continuation of my artistic investigation.
I hope that presenting my creative process in this exposition can be relevant in the broader panorama of the musical community by providing an opportunity to reflect on our current relation with performance. With this experimentation I intend to question the format of the traditional classical music concert, focusing on the role of the performer and ultimately reflecting on the function of musical performance in society.
Research Question:
- How can the philosophical ideas of Russian Symbolism and the aesthetic of Russian mystic composer Nikolai Obukhov inspire and shape my approach to the performance of the composer’s solo piano works, and shed a new light on the role of the performer in classical music performance?
Throughout this exposition I will analyze the most relevant features of Nikolai Obukhov’s aesthetic and musical language, contextualizing them in the broader cultural philosophical panorama of Russian Symbolism. I will focus on understanding the artistic approach to musical performance, and its social function in modern Western contexts. Building this framework will be possible through the analysis of primary sources such as media files, magazine issues, scores, concert reviews, and secondary sources for the purpose of philosophical, cultural, and biographical contextualization. In order to reduce these features into concepts that can be applied to performance, I will look into contemporary performance tools and into my own past performative experience.
My intention is not to do a historically-informed reconstruction of the performance of Obukhov’s works, but rather to allow myself to be inspired by the cultural context and spiritual beliefs of the composer in order to create my own staging of Obukhov’s works in the 21st century. Through this process I will reflect on the transformation under which the so-called “traditional” concert format will continue to go.
In the first chapter I will provide a brief biography of Nikolai Obukhov and in the second, a literature review that addresses the most significant bibliographical sources used on this research. A third chapter will follow with the contextualization of the cultural and philosophical panorama of Russian Symbolism. In the fourth chapter I will analyze the aesthetic of Obukhov’s most relevant work: Le Livre de Vie (in English, The Book of Life). In the fifth chapter I will reflect on the meaning of the concepts of transcendence and unity in our current musical paradigm. The sixth chapter will constitute the whole creative process behind the framework of my performative approach, reflecting on the role of the performer, understanding how the philosophical ideas of Russian symbolism translated into Obukhov musical language, and finding a practical application of these philosophical conceptions today. Finally, in my conclusions chapter I intend to reflect on my artistic growth during this experience, and on issues of relevance and implications for the wider musical community.