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As the quarantine has affected your life and career plans?

Alexander Raskatov: the Situation is tense, but in my regime, nothing has changed. I’m writing a new Opera, “Animal farm” by Orwell. 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. Time began to flow once different, otherwise, has become “thicker” or something. Is a reassessment of values. I think in the music shop too. This period gave us the opportunity to better know ourselves.

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. Not published 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. What if the children of Pushkin would not give a license to a Mussorgsky or Tchaikovsky! How many operas we ��you missed. Although the Amsterdam Opera house and spread out in front of the heir to the red carpet, the latter did 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. 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.