Concert No. 6 “Dance in Metal”

Anya Zholud’s “Forms in Air,” embodied as metal structures, “reproduce various everyday situations, stripping objects of their deceptive surfaces and helping us see their invisible essence, foundation, framework, and skeleton,” in the artist’s words. The impetus for these experiments came from her recognition of an equivalence between a drawn line and a metal rod.

“In her very first works made from metal rods, she found something that artists rarely manage to discover: a visual language of her own,” says Olga Sviblova, art historian, art critic, curator, and founder and director of the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. Anya Zholud’s sculptures, made from a hard, cold material, are a true “dance in metal.”

A “dance in metal” can also be found in the music of the 20th and early 21st centuries. In 1939, the iconoclast John Cage composed his groundbreaking “First Construction (in Metal)” for percussion sextet, establishing this family of musical instruments as an independent expressive force. In Russia, after a long hiatus — several decades after the experiments in “noise music” of the First Avant-Garde — the legendary musician Mark Pekarsky gave this field a powerful impetus beginning in the second half of the 1970s. The work of his Percussion Ensemble inspired many composers to create new pieces. Today, their number exceeds two hundred.

This programme presents works for solo percussion and percussion ensemble. Their percussive sonorities fill Anya Zholud’s “Forms in Air,” generating new meanings as we observe this “dance in metal.”

Tigran Mansurian (b. 1939)
“Dance” for viola and tambourine (1998 / rev. 2000, 2010)

Sofia Gubaidulina (1931–2025)
Sonata for Percussion (1966), in three movements, for two performers

Tigran Mansurian (b. 1939)
The duet “Lied, Gebilde und Wandschirm” (“Song, Form and Screen”) for viola and percussion (1998 / rev. 2000, 2010), in two movements