Alexey Smirnov's blog

I like piano concerts. Last Thursday I went to Taipei to a concert of Konstantin Scherbakov – a Russian pianist who now lives in Switzerland. I got on the bus at the stop right next to my office. It is very convenient that buses to Taipei run directly from our institute. So we left around 5:10 PM and since there were no traffic jams at 6PM we were already in Taipei. I did not quite know at which stop to get off as the bus was following an unconventional route (dropping off people here and there upon their request). Finally, I asked my neighbour in the bus and she told me where to get off. Then I took MRT and at around 7PM arrived to National Concert Hall. It was my first visit to this hall. I should say it is not as big as I expected. In Russia as well as in the US (at least in New York) there are much bigger halls. But the size of the hall does not impact the quality of the concert. The latter was above any expectation.

I have attended concerts of many good piano players, including the winner of Tchaikovsky competition Vladimir Krainev. But when I heard Konstantin Scherbakov playing I realized that this is what I never heard before. He is a real virtuoso – very gifted person with an exceptional sense of rhythm and extremely precise in the way he moves his fingers – very fast and accurate. In addition, I can see that he learned everything he could from his teachers at Moscow Conservatory. His every touch of piano happens at the very moment it should happen, and in the way it should happen. But can I say that his style of playing is a bit too automatic and robotic? Certainly no. I think Scherbakov is a very emotional person but he knows how to hide his emotions. But at certain times he opens up his personality and becomes very expressive waving his hands up and down. This adds dramatism to his performance.

The concert consisted of two parts. The second part was especially impressive. Scherbakov was playing Beethoven symphony translated to piano by Listz. This piece of music is extremely complicated and requires virtoso capabilities as well as extreme attention to details. Scherbakov demonstrated all of this and he certainly deserved the standing ovation the audience gave him.

In the concert hall it was possible to buy a few CDs of Scherbakov. Each CD costs 220NTD. There was also an option to buy the entire collection for a wholesale price. I went for this option and acquired a whole bag of CDs. I am so happy now. In my room I can enjoy the music of Rachmaninov, Bach, Arensky, and many other great composers many of which I did not know before (such as Resphigi or Godowsky).

This concert is a part of series of Russian pianists visiting Taiwan. The second concert is that of Scherbakov’s pupil, Yulianna Avdeeva. I am looking forward to attending the next concert!

At our Lunar New Year party our band performed a number of songs. I was singing Moscow Nights in English and in Russian, and then dancing with our colleagues while the girls were singing Moscow Nights in Chinese. It was a lot of fun!

This year I have already attended so many concerts as I never attended before when I was living in Tampere or on Long Island in the US. One reason is that the music played here is indeed world-class, for example Marc Minkowski is a famous French conductor, Anne Kauppi is one of the best Finnish pianists and is possible one of the best in the world. Most concerts are priced very cheaply at 10 Euros, there are free concerts as well.

I have noticed that French composers are very popular these days. It is a new trend I guess. While I was educated in music school in Russia we have been listening to Bach and Mozart, that is mostly German composers as well as of course lots of Russian music of Tchaikovsky, etc. but I don’t remember any French composers. Therefore, this year I have discovered Marcel Dupre, Gabriel Faure, and we can think of Frederick Chopin as a composer of French ancestry. Their music is not inferior to that of major classical composers, but it is very different. We definitely need to take a closer look at the French composers.

Marc Minkowski was a guest conductor at a YLE Radio Symphony Orchestra. The venue was the Stone Church. Quite traditionally, the churches are used as concert halls in Finland. It is interesting that this concert was sold out! Fortunately, I got my ticket one week in advance. Apparently, concerts on Friday nights are very popular. The concert included three parts. First, Symphoni #3 of Schubert was performed. Then after a short break Requiem of Gabriel Faure followed. It is an amazing piece of music. Traditionally, a requiem is performed when someone dies. Therefore, it should convey sadness. But this requiem is very different. It has quite optimistic tunes which are attributed to human’s acceptance into the Paradise. In the final part of the concert a trio of Mendelssohn was performed. A trio for piano, violin, and cello is a type of composition that keeps me thinking for a long time. Earlier I listened to a piano trio of Tchaikovsky thus now I think that trio is a major composition form on par with symphony or concert. But it is neither one of them. A concert is a competition between a solo instrument and the orchestra. A symphony involves too many parties. In terms of the meaning that a symphony conveys it is often related to a large-scale event or the destiny of the whole nation, something global. It might seem surprising that I attribute verbal description to any piece of music but as Picasso once said there is no abstract art. A painter has always an idea in mind and his/her abstract painting is the result of expressing the idea in this particular way. Therefore, a musical trio also conveys an idea and we can compare it to a certain type of painting. To me a trio is a conversation happening within a close group of friends who know each other very well. They might discuss various happenings in their life, the present and past. The only question is why is this worth depicting? I don’t remember who was saying that but the idea is that only great events constitute the true art, they convey a message to the next generations. What is that message in a afternoon-tea conversation of three people? Answering to that question would reveal the meaning behind a musical trio, it will make its art value measurable. But I still don’t understand what is the position of a trio among various composition forms such as symphonies, concerts, etc. This question is intriguing me a lot.

Another interesting event was Kirkko soikoon, a festival of church music which included classical music as well. It continued the whole week and included tens of concerts. During this festival I have bought a few CDs displayed above. Here is a brief description of the concerts that I have attended:

• Jan Lehtola performed Marcel Dupre in Kallio Church. There were two parts in his concert. Le chemin de la croix op. 29 was performed in the first one, Symphony for organ #1 “Passion” was performed after that.
• The next concert was in Helsinki Cathedral Crypt – a small hall that did not have even a stage. The grand piano was located very near the audience. It was very interesting to watch Anne Kauppi playing as I was sitting in one of the first rows very closely. This year people mark the 200-year anniversary of Frederick Chopin. A number of his etudes and ballades were performed. Gorgeous concert!
• On Friday there was another amazing concert – a 4-hour vocal marathon in the Old Church! The singers were signing along with organ or piano. Helsinki has lots of very nice voices!
• During weekend I went to Mikael Agricola Church located near my house. An youth ensemble called Higher Ground Band was performing there. I was surprised to see lots of families with children attending this concert. Typically, the audience of church concerts includes very few youth which I think marks the generation gap in the society. These energetic young people bridge the gap between younger and older, as well as between different religions. Traditionally, singing modernized songs is attributed to Baptist church. Finnish people belong mostly to the Lutheran church but they still attend Baptist concerts and sing along with them. The audience was raving, it was such a great concert! Below is a video, it is quite long. Watch it till the end to see how exciting the concert was!

I have attended many organ concerts this summer. Most of the time I was recording these amazing concerts. Now when the cold winter is coming those charming sounds of summer organ remind me of warm summer. I am listening to MP3 that I have recorded all the time instead of radio nowdays.

But I would also like to share this amazing music. I have built a library of my recordings using MIT Exhibit. Here it is. There are 100 MP3 available as a free download. The library has convenient features for searching using composer name, location, and artist.

The official concert series site is here but it has concert announcements only. The concerts in this series are free.

I have attended an amazing concert in the Stone Church – Temppeliaukion kirkko. Later on I found out that it is considered one of the main tourist attractions in Helsinki. It is quite close to the railway station. However, I have never heard it earlier.

The orchestra was that of YLE Radio. The conductor was Russian-born Dmitri Slobodeniouk. There were three parts in the concert. In the first part the music of Finnish composers was performed. Jean Sibelius the Oceanides and Lotta Wennäkoski Soie.

After the break a Russian part has started. Autumnal Sketch and Symphony #1 of Prokofiev were performed.

After the second break the music of Tchaikovsky was performed. Piano Trio “In memory of a great artist” for the piano, a violin, and cello. The duration of the concert was amazing as usual – almost 3 hours. I enjoyed it so much!

I am going to Lahti to attend one of the concerts of Sibelius Festival. Every year there is such a festival in Finland. It takes place in Sibelius Hall, a large wooden building. Even though the festival is not in Helsinki I decided to go there because it takes only 1 hour to get to Lahti by commuter train.

The tonight’s program is as follows:

The Dryad
Violin Concerto
Symphony No. 3

Henning Kraggerud, violin

Henning is considered one of the best Scandinavian violinists. I am looking forward to attending the concert!

Update after the concert. It was great! The public was so welcoming! Henning Kraggerud used a fantastic violin which sounded very nicely. He actually performed a couple more pieces and so did the orchestra after they played the symphony.

I have changed my perception of Sibelius. Long time ago I have got one of CDs with his music that sounded like quite traditional classic music. But the violin concert is so different. It reveals the power of violin as musical instrument. I guess it is quite a difficult piece to play. Even thought previously I read that this violin concert is controversial I think it shows the depth of Sibelius’ talent as composer, I think this is one of his best things. In fact, he was born in Hameenlinna, a town which I visited several times because there is a castle there as well as few interesting museums. But I never visited Sibelius museum. Sibelius family comes from Sweden. This is why there are so many parts in his music that resemble ocean, or journey, or waves, something exploratory. In this sense he reminds me of Musorgsky or Borodin. But Sibelius symphonies show another aspect of his talent. He makes extensive use of pipe instruments such as trumpet and horn. I guess this is because Hameenlinna where he grew up was a military camp and that gave him lots of opportunity to get exposed to military music.

After the concert I have bought a CD with a few other symphonies of Sibelius.

Minna Raassina played at Tampere Catherdral on June 21.

Here is an example of what was played yesterday in Tampere Cathedral.

The music of the following composers was performed:

• Ernst-Thilo Kalke
• Joonas Kokkonen
• Lauri Kokkonen
• John Redford
• Johann Christoph Oley
• Saima Harmaja
• Olivier Messiaen
• Paavali Tarsolainen

I have attended an amazing organ concert in Tampere Cathedral. I think the level of skill of Aitor Olea Juaristi is absolutely fantastic. I was raised in the tradition of Russian music of 19th century. After attending this concert I realized that it has its roots in European organ music. Organ sounds like the whole orchestra.

However, the organ as the instrument is so amazing that people are still composing organ music. It offers very deep possibilities for expressing your musical ideas. During this concert the music of the following composers was played:

• Jesus Guridi Bidaola
• Ignacio Mocoroa Damborenea
• Camille Saint-Saens
• Louis Vierne
• Henri Mulet

Basically, contemporary music.This concert was the first in the series of summer organ concerts in Tampere. I would like to attend every concert in the series because it includes such exceptional organists as

Minna Raassina on 21.6 and Jan Lehtola on 28.6

And here is a recording from Juaristi’s concert.

This is a nice time when the summer has already started but the vacation has not begun yet. The weather allows to enjoy the outdoors activities. Of course, there are lots of things to do on a weekend, like cleaning up the apartment, reading the books, working on computer. But I give myself a break and embark on a journey to see what Tampere has to offer. I am quite surprised that after spending year and a half in Tampere there are lots of interesting things to do. And I only wonder what I was doing last summer.

Anyway, I have decided to officially measure the time it takes to get from home to Dynamo building where company’s office is by skates. Now I have Nokia 5800 device with GPS and I am using sports tracker application. Here is the map which you can click to get the statistics.

Then I watched a nice performance on the stadium. It is something in-between aerobics, circus, and sports. Very worth seeing! Normal people are doing cool things together. It was a 2-hour concert.

Nice rotations high above the ground, in the middle of the video. I think it is quite dangerous.

I like this gigantic equipment.

Here I have used the zooming feature of Qik. It is a very nice video streaming application indeed!

Then I went shopping to Stockmann. After a while I returned to the stadium to see if there are any other events. There was nothing going on but I saw a boat on Laukontori pier and decided to check it out. Well, it is nice when you can just hang out during a weekend without forcing yourself into doing lots of necessary things. I went on a boat trip to Viikinsaari Island. I think that air is fresher on the island than in Hervanta which has lots of trees. On the lake it is a lot easier to survive the heat of the summer. There is a nice park on the island as well as restaurant and concert hall. The battery in the cellphone had no more energy so I have not taken any pictures there.

It takes 20 minutes to get to the island, the cost of the roundtrip is 10 Euros.

I have attended a concert of Jean Michel Jarre in Helsinki, in Hartwall Arena. I arrived to Helsinki in the afternoon and had fun attending several museums. I will describe that other part in the next post.

Hartwall Arena is a medium-sized stadium with a roof. Therefore, this concert was indeed private as typically Jarre performs in front of multi-million audiences using city landscape as the background image of his laser shows. I guess the music that he played was specially designed to match with such in-doors environment. To start with, I was impressed that the sound was of very good quality in every part of the stadium. That’s because of the backstage sound system that he uses. In classical music, lots of effort is spent on designing the shape of concert hall ceiling to improve sound quality.

The music itself revealed the great talent of Jarre the composer. To me it sounded a bit like Shostakovich. Jarre uses lots of traditional folk tunes and reinforces them with electrical instruments. A few of his instruments sound like church bells, others like French accordeon played in Paris. Obviously, Jarre has processed lots of music in his head and compiled it to present to the general public.

The audience in Helsinki was more ordinary than I expected. We have to admit that the concert hall was half-empty, especially the upper rows. I guess the classic music audience decided not to attend this pop music show. They were wrong. Jean Michel only tries to promote the music as art no matter which genre it is. His performances are above such division. Thus, the people who attended the concert looked like office workers, or even factory people. But during the concert they were raving. They loved the music that Jarre played. Thus, the goal of unification people with music was achieved. Chances are that these people will decide to play music or even become composers themselves.

The instruments used in the concert were fantastic.

The laser harp is a powerful instrument which is intuitive to play. In computer science, everybody is trying to simplify the computers and operating systems. For example touch screen cellphones do not require any learning before becoming an essential tool. And so is the laser harp. Reinforced with artificial intelligence it starts shining when the musician approaches it. When it is being touched, a background music is played to match the tune that the musician improvised. I read on Wikipedia that this is not a new instrument but I saw it the first time. I think that such instruments can start a new phase of composers. Everybody is listening to the music of Mozart and Bach for several centuries. But new classical composers do not appear. This is because the environment for which the classical instruments were designed has changed. New environment demands new instruments and laser harp is a perfect example of such instrument.

Another important component of the show were the lasers. I also liked the huge backstage screen that changed its color arbitrarily. The trick of combining images with music is used nowdays even in classic music concerts, for example in Carnegie Hall a portrait of the composer is displayed when his music is played.

With lasers and lights, Jean Michel was able to display complex images resembling Egyptian pyramids or extraterrestial landscape. In addition to processing lots of existing music he made a huge step forward because it looked like his music came from space.

There is only one drawback of attending a live performance. Its quality is so good that you cannot listen to any home sound system afterward. After I arrived to home I turned on the radio. It was playing a song. To me it sounded as if it needed energy badly, as if its batteries were running out of power. But it was connected to electrical grid. Nothing can match the power of sound and beauty of lasers that Jean Michel Jarre was able to achieve.