Output details

Black Icons (for solo cello and ensemble)

Black Icons for solo cello and ensemble (283)

It was a requirement of this commission that the work engage with Russian culture, art and society. I was keen to find a living artist who had lived through and had an artistic reaction to current political change in Russia. Black Icons was inspired by the work of the Russian poet Alina Vitukhnovskaya, arrested and wrongly imprisoned by the FSB on fabricated charges. I was impressed by the poet’s work for its beautiful form of linguistic expression, combined with brutal imagery, which seemed to question the relationship between a refined form of poetic expression, and a sense of alienation and brutality.

Part of my research involves the search for a meaningful, politically informed art, supporting the view that it is through art that new forms of social understanding and political action can be found. Can an artist’s reaction to a political situation have any meaning; can or should this in any way be reflected in the structure of the work? I at once felt that Vitukhnovskaya’s poetry fulfilled these criteria, and it was my aim to use the material and structure of the work to try to reflect a similar artistic reaction to certain socio-political contexts.

The work is not a conventional concerto. It aims to explore aspects of alienation between the soloist and ensemble. The soloist is at times completely subsumed into the overall texture, or may be seeking to navigate a journey through various unstable and changing landscapes, alternating with isolated solo sections, or trying to assimilate or oppose the ensemble textures. The research involved working closely with the cellist Alexander Ivashkin.

It was axiomatic to this approach that my musical language should not in any way be compromised or simplified with a view to making it superficially ‘express’ something.