As the quarantine has affected your life and career plans?
Alexander Raskatov: the Situation is tense, but in my regime, nothing has changed. Composers are, by definition, still less travel. Their place at the Desk. Quietly, quietly, no noise, though silence and it seems stalkeresque insidious. I’m writing a new Opera by order of the Amsterdam – “Animal farm” by Orwell in English. The premiere is scheduled in season 2022/23. Write like mad. 19 September in Rotterdam Gergiev will conduct at the festival first act of the Opera “Eclipse”. And in the middle of October I hope to be in St. Petersburg as Chairman of the jury of the competition for young composers. A. P. Petrov. My wife and I show up every day in the house to sit it is impossible, especially when the window is +26. Shy away from passers-by, and they from us. Little people, the birds are singing, everything is blooming, not air – ozone! Nature rejoices at the absence of man. We she was tired, apparently. Time began to flow once different, otherwise, has become “thicker” or something. There is another level of concentration, when it disappears all about. Is a reassessment of values. I think in the music shop too. This period gave us the opportunity to know myself better.
You are as an artist, as a person what I saw and heard in this call of coronavirus?
Alexander Raskatov: I’m not a sociologist and I can not say for all of humanity. But by coincidence shortly before the pandemic had read the book of Waterford about Genghis Khan and I learned that in the fourteenth century, without any conspiracy theories, no leakage of bioweapons plague has completely destroyed the whole system of the world economy. And she came by coincidence is also from China, lost almost two thirds of the population and the former, as now, the center of the world economy. Europe has lost 17 million people. And humanity somehow survived this without gadgets and microchips. Came great artists, poets, composers. Nobody had vetoed the idea, intelligence, private life, using the factor of plague. Even today, those who must control our lungs, do not climb into our brains and thoughts. Here I fully agree with Yuval Noah Harari, who in his article “the world after the coronavirus” wrote: “Coronavirus legitimacy horrific system of total surveillance”.
how long have You lived in France. Why did you choose this country?
Alexander Raskatov: I live in France for fifteen years. Specially did not choose – it happened. This country saved my health and possibly life, for that always will be required. Musically, I am not here as a French composer, as it were, “parallel”, which makes me very happy. Say, Lyon Opera ordered Opera for me Germania Heiner Muller, putting it in 2017. And before that Lyon�� was delivered to my Opera “heart of a Dog” (2014), received the award for best Opera premiere in France. Then I got in Paris Antoine Livio prize. In France I am attracted to the General atmosphere, when no one reaches into the soul, and this is a lot. Plus the General feeling of comfort and until recently security. Besides, I was lucky the last few years, I live at 1519 built with all the attributes and mystical atmosphere of the time. Even the two ghosts in the night seen. I’m not kidding.
Opera “Eclipse” and a live version which was performed at the Mariinsky theatre, dedicated to the events in the life of the Decembrists, but you are in it as if had a presentiment of the disasters of our time. Your intuition is leading you in life?
Alexander Raskatov: I am by nature a man of intuition, of instinct. The intuition always laid unconscious, the hidden element is rational. But the opposite does not happen. Intuition is necessary in this genre, like Opera. Djerdj the Kurtag, listening to the fragments of my Opera “Dog’s heart”, told me in Russian: “Sasha, you need to have chutzpah, so to write!” The main thing my intuitive child – Green Mass (the”Green Mass”, 2016) for soloists, chorus and orchestra. It seems to me itself written, and there’s nothing I could do about it. There I was, I think, really foresaw something happening today.
is There light at the end of the tunnel in the issue of the performances of the Opera “Dog’s heart” in Russia?
Alexander Raskatov: the Most disastrous for me, the question to which the answer is: the end of the world, solid tunnel. According to my calculations, “heart of a Dog” was performed a total of thirty-two times, including in the Amsterdam Opera, English National Opera, La Scala, Opera national de Lyon. As I say, the novel was banned for ideological reasons, and Opera – economic. Appetites of the heir are expressed in six-figure sums and not in rubles. Need a special issue to tell me about all the misadventures associated with “the heart of a Dog” – like Thriller. In each country, copyrights on the works of opus postmortem different. Unpublished during the author’s lifetime thing starts not from the date of the death of the author, and from the date of first publication. Somewhere freely as in Holland or Italy, somewhere- not. The most rigid in this sense, the USA and Russia, where the work is protected for 95 (!) years from the date of first publication. If I count the publication in YMCA PRESS (1969), we invite all the Russian premiere in the year 2064. How fortunate that the problem with this author’s lawlessness was not in the XIX century. And suddenly the date of Pushkin would not give a license to a Mussorgsky or Tchaikovsky. How many operas we would not be missing. Although the Amsterdam Opera and spread out in front of the heir to the red carpet last do not deign to honor with his presence the or the play.
Some writers or philosophers to support you today?
Alexander Raskatov: amazes Me every line of Andrei Platonov, very close to Brodsky. In philosophy – a great fascination with Jung. Read the work of Bertrand Russell in English and you wonder how this man foresaw a hundred years ago. If it is quite difficult, and can be good detective to open, the more that our life resembles it more and more.
Alexander Raskatov graduated in 1978 from the Moscow Conservatoire in the class of albert Leman. In 1994, at the invitation of the publishing house M. P. Belaieff moved to Germany, since 2005 living in France. The winner of the award of the Salzburg Easter festival (1998, a String Quartet according to Borges). Range of creative interests extends from chamber music to Opera. Among his works “Pas de Deux” for soprano and saxophone Opera “GerMANIA” by H. Muller, “The Last Freedom” for chorus and orchestra, “Gebet”/Kaddish for voice and Quartet, “Voisés of frozen land” for 7 soloists, brass and percussion, Byzantina Missa” for choir and orchestra on texts by Ephrem the Syrian. Most popular in Europe is the Opera “Dog’s heart” (2009) by Mikhail Bulgakov, which premiered in Russia cannot take place because of problems with the heir of the writer.
