So let's talk about Bronius Kutavicius, why he's a giant, and why late Soviet bloc music is THE music of the late 20th century...
In the wake of Shostakovich is a whole generation of Soviet composers who took advantage of the thaw and are only now completing their careers. Perhaps the giant of them all was Alfred Schnittke, for whom it becomes clear, at least to me, that if the late 20th century had modern Beethoven, it was him.
Musicians are like any other artists. There is only so much you can do to make your music interesting if you're a complete naif outside of music. If you're a true genius like Mozart or Gershwin or Bizet, you may not need to read widely or experience the world, but most of us are not wunderkinder, we are doing the best we can with limited means, but within the limitations of our intelligence, we can hopefully superceed them with limitless curiosity and empathy. An artist without a sense of history or philosophy or psychology or science is limited by their own perspective, and artists, let's face it, are not exactly known for their accurate perceptions of realities right in front of them.
What artists are best at is being living witnesses - explaining the human heart and all its desires and dreams and frustrations and heartbreaks and nightmares and hopes. Every work is a reflection of the artist at their core: their beliefs and speculations about love, god, humans, and the world. The artist is there as a filter to interpret the events of their time and also put those events in the context of human experiences we all have.
Kutavicius, like Veljo Tormis and Peteris Vasks, had the equally fortunate and unfortunate luck of bearing witness to yet another small Baltic nation known for its incredible vocal and folk traditions, but sung in a language understood by no one but natives.
Shostakovich is known to the classical music world as 'the end', he is, to this day, the last composer unassailably let into the standard repertoire, but he was as much a beginning as an end. After Shostakovich, there was a deluge of Soviet composers who wrote about the struggles of their time and place in barely disguised metaphors. and there are so many great Eastern European composers who took inspiration from Shostakovich's tightrope walk above Stalin's lion cage.
Kutavicius, like Veljo Tormis, drew inspiration not only from Baltic choral traditions and folk music, but also from ancient pagan religions. If there was one thing in the Soviet Union more daring than declaring public allegiance to Christianity, it was declaring public allegiance to paganism. To write such music, and more importantly, write it well, is a statement of Baltic nationalism against Soviet ideals and a statement of tolerance for differences.
The reason a few of us find music of the popular tradition a little tame is because it stops short of ultimate things. It is music that either does not give much sense that the musicians are not aware that life gets more difficult than textbook heartbreak or mental illness and addiction or relatively micro marginalizations. Or it is by people who know that very well, and yet still elect to paper over the most difficult truths. Obviously this is not true of everything in the popular traditions, but too much of it... Nor is that to say that classical music does not have many, many, many of it's own problems, many of which has to do with its too high opinion of itself....
The art music of Soviet sphere is an eternal document of life under repression. It is a miracle that the authorities even allowed it to be written, though much of it encountered repression after its premieres. It's the music of people who've endured all. Who were children amid the Great Terror, adolescents in the Great Patriotic War, and came of age in the Thaw when finally, after forty years of continuous death, artists could speak the Soviet experience with some measure of freedom. This music speaks not only for the composer but for its listeners, the first of whom must have realized that merely showing up in the audience could put them on a list that sends them to prison.
Kutavicius is yet another composer whose giant output is mostly not available on record. What we have is music of giant spirituality. It forever dances around the line between the avant-garde complexity and completely simple accessibility. What I've heard includes some of the greatest music of the 20th century, and it's just another great Late Soviet composer with whose achievfement the world has yet to come to terms.
Listen to the Dzukian Variations on the first link (first ten minutes). Then listen to the Last Pagan Rites, the first 27 minutes of the second link. This is music of vision as towering as anyone ever wrote in the 20th century.
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