A FESTIVAL-LONG STORY OF PAVANE

The creative duo of vocalist Farida Mammadova and pianist Yuliya Kerimova are known in Baku for their exclusive repertoire. Their non-trivial approach and highly professional presentation have long been popular, with each new project becoming a phenomenon among the connoisseurs.

As part of the Uzeyir Hajibeyov International Music Festival, these two talented individuals have once again proved that art has always been a birthplace of something new and unique. The monuments of art in music reflect the melodies and rhythms of the era, are still alive, and respond to the touch. The most mysterious of all the arts, music, can express the subtlest movements of the soul, beyond the reach of words. It possesses our souls as long as we are able to listen. According to musicians, this was the hidden message, the essence of the Century-Long Pavane, which coincided with the classical music festival. The performers expressed their gratitude to the Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan for the opportunity to perform this programme for the first time at such a significant event.

"Both of you have once again hit a record accomplishment. We would like to see your support for this kind of projects grow and the geography of your performances expand beyond the borders of Azerbaijan. What are your personal emotions?"

"My emotions have remained stable over the years: anticipation of yet another meeting with my audience before the next season. There are plenty of plans, as always. It is nice to see the Uzeyir Hajibeyov International Festival of Classical Music give a good a start to such activities. This large-scale event is expected each year with discoveries of new names, works and so on. This year, my loyal fellow-student pianist Yulia Kerimova and I became a part of it when we performed our next common project The Century-Long Pavane on the stage of the International Mugham Center. It became a good tradition that both of us can share with the connoisseurs of true musical art. We are able to attract the increasing number of listeners thanks to new compositions, or rather discoveries, that are either performed for the first time or rarely performed in Baku with each of our programmes.”

"As far as I remember, pavane is a type of solemn and slow dancing?.."

FM: "Moreover, the pavane music, which was quite popular in Europe back in the 16th century, was a ceremonial music. It was common among the members of royal families to open balls with it. Pavane was considered an aristocratic dance, showing the elegance of manners and movements. For us pavane is like a tuning fork, which sets the ‘degree of perception’ of an event through its unhurriedness, when one plunges into an atmosphere where the music leads through a kind of intellectual labyrinth. Yuliya and I have designed the project as something that can take the listeners to another level of perception and inner spirituality at some turning point. This time though we mainly included compositions not widely known to the guests of Baku. The programmewas organically built upon Maurice Ravel's Pavane pour la mort infante symbolising a farewell to a certain ideal of beauty, morality and purity that has become an object of nostalgia for modern mature people.”

YK: “I am very happy to be able to experience such great music, to understand and feel it. Our public is not spoilt by evenings of chamber vocal music. In fact, in recent decades this genre, if not dying out, has undergone great changes in Azerbaijan. That’s why we wanted to revive the genre. In this sense Farida, with whom I have long-standing professional and human relations, and I are doing our best to achieve this.”

"As a person familiar with your musical projects, I assume their musical material becomes a sort of educational manifesto..."

FM: Pianist Yulia Kerimova and I always try to touch upon socially important topics in our performances and focus the audience's attention on the relevance of classical authors in the contemporary era. As you know, in February 2022 we presented our next project Komm, Hoffnung (Come, Hope), which was originally planned for the end of 2020, the anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven, but was postponed to a later date due to the lockdown. Thus the atmosphere of post-pandemic depression filled the concert, which was released only a year and a half later with a different and deeper meaning. It was as if we were rethinking the freedoms and possibilities we had been used to. Thanks to our success we received an invitation from the Ministry of Culture to prepare a new programme for the next Uzeyir Hajibeyov International Music Festival. And today, some time after the concert, I can say with confidence that this time too we have succeeded in creating the right mood for the audience...”

YK: "For me, working with Farida is always a work of art without barriers. Although all the accents, nuances and details have already been worked out in the process, being on stage still means a lot of improvisation. It is impossible to predict how the situation will turn out, because the stage is a miracle. The performer is like a radio antenna, picking up the vibe from the audience, becoming a conduit of energy. I think we have managed to merge with our audience in a single stream.”

"Your performance at the festival was quite unusual in terms of names and works. It was like a vivid mosaic put together, sort of a 3D canvas."

FM: "That's right. That's why we have focused on composers who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - Modest Mussorgsky, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, Gara Garayev. After all, their creative paths were closely intertwined. The century in which these composers lived through the tragic events passed like a mournful procession of an ancient pavane, in which the concepts of life and death have remained far beyond the notions of good and evil... How responsive is the human heart to the pain of others and to the events that led to it? Perhaps this is the main question we have decided to ask ourselves and our listeners...”

YK: "Our programme—Century-Long Pavane—combines a lot of interesting currents, but they all conceptually focus on the idea of pavane as a dance-march both stylistically and figuratively. While Maurice Ravel's Pavane and Gara Garayev's Pavane focus on the idea of light, Igor Stravinsky's Tango is a completely different energy, opposite in spirit, in a sense even infernal. Thus we presented two poles, where the Tango was the listener's preparation for Modest Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. I think both Benjamin Britten’s music based on Alexander Pushkin’s poetry and Modest Mussorgsky's music were the key semantic areas in our case. And it was very important for us to share this music with our audience, to make everyone get to their feelings and emotional response.”

"Your project goes beyond music thanks to the introduction of accent photos..."

FM: "In our projects, we tend to go beyond the strictly musical evening through the introduction of various genres of visual art. This time, thanks to the name of dance (pavane) as the key idea, we decided to emphasise that rhythm. It is pulsation, movement and cyclicality. An understanding of rhythm is not only characteristic of musical works but is very often used in architecture which, according to a well-known expression, is ‘music frozen in stone’. Agdes Baghirzade, a talented photographer, is widely known for her photographs of architectural structures and their fragments. And we are grateful to Agdes for her kind acceptance of our request to use her photos as decoration for the concert. Her popularity and rich experience as a photographer with a professional background in music also contributed positively to our project. As a result none of us had any problems with the selection of video slides. By a strange and mystical coincidence, the theme of the evening was a response to the recent tragic events in our country. We collectively decided to present our concert programme as a tribute to the blessed memory of those who perished in the war. On that evening, our subjective emotional experiences added value to the artistic and technical challenges we were facing throughout the concert...”

"When a vocalist takes to the chamber stage, he can realise his personal passions by presenting works that are interesting to the audience."

FM: "As far as performing aspects are concerned, almost the entire programme included works rarely performed, or never performed, in Baku. I have long wanted to sing English composer Benjamin Britten's cycle Echo of the Poet based on poems by great Pushkin and dedicated to outstanding musicians Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich. I got my hands on these notes by chance about twenty years ago and they have evidently been waiting for their time. The music of the cycle reflects all the psychological depths of Pushkin's poetry and raises the central question of artist's role in the world, his creative solitude but also his inability not to react to events going on around him. We also identified an interesting parallel when we studied Mussorgsky's cycle. Internationally, it is performed using low voices - mezzo-soprano, baritone or bass - and Galina Vishnevskaya was the only soprano to break this stereotype. She managed to give full voice to the lower register. I was inspired by her example for many years. During the concert I also decided to break that bar in my own way.”

"But at the same time, the concert also gave the audience something sublime...?"

FM: "In contrastto heavy and dramatically tense second part of the concerto, the works we chose for the first part included an element of fairy-tale—naive and idealistic, but also somewhat illusory... These are songs by Stravinsky and Ravel, where the real world and the toy world are intertwined with one another and death is taken for granted... This is also Prokofiev's mini opera The Ugly Duckling, which is, of course, not entirely about ducks and swans but about man's true place in the world, social values and children's belief in a happy ending...”

"Lest we forget that Farida Mammadova is also an honoured artist working for the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre! What can your fans expect?"

FM: "Yes, I am currently working on several operas, but I am planning to return to our stage after working for ten years on Mozart's masterpiece Così fan tutte, where I perform one of the most difficult parts for the soprano, the role of Fiordiligi. Despite the conventional comic-sounding name of the genre of this opera, the finale makes us think seriously about the values of love, sincerity and fidelity in everyone's life.”

"It is nice to hear about the increasing number of titles in your repertoire..."

FM: "...A credit goes to the management of our opera house, which constantly challenges us with interesting and creative tasks. This requires a high standard of performance. Young people join in organically alongside their experienced colleagues. In addition to a shared desire and enthusiasm to rise to the challenge there is a whole team of professionals - vocal coaches and concertmasters of international recognition, who are regularly invited by our theatre to work with soloists. I would like to express my special thanks to the management of the theatre for this opportunity.”

"How do you manage to stay in excellent vocal form despite your busy schedule?"

FM: "My motto is ‘Go sing even in the most confusing situation in life!’ But seriously, I always have a (very small!) group of confidants around me who are very frank to me and can soberly critisise my performance. This helps me not to get euphoric. But, if necessary, this also prevents me from sinking into depression. Secondly, the appetite comes after performance... I always realise that I can do more and better than yesterday... That’s how I take on the stage to sing!...”