About the music of Edison Denisov
Edison Denisov is my favorite composer, that’s why I decided to share my thoughts and my hearing with the work of this amazing Russian man, forced to experience all the charms of loneliness and lack of demand in Soviet Russia and found understanding and his performers in France. However, he never left his homeland for a long time, having connected himself with the Moscow Conservatory and the Union of Composers, to whom he devoted a lot of his time and attention, leaving behind a whole galaxy of talented young composers … Yes, and most of his works are written here, in Russia, in Moscow and in creative summer cottages …
I personally was lucky enough to meet Edison Vasilyevich more than once in the Union on Denisov’s Mondays, at concerts and in the House of Creativity in Sortavala. He was an intelligent, generous in thought and support, benevolent, kind and helpful person, who never put himself, an ingenious composer, above his interlocutor. Communicating with him was not only useful, but easy and joyful, because the life-giving energy of light, warmth and mutual understanding always emanated from him, and it was possible to speak on any topic and not at all only professional … His charming smile, light irony, a somewhat mocking and radiant look, the absence of any posture and the naturalness of behavior will never be forgotten, and even brief meetings were always fruitful: Denisov could not and could not talk, but always gave very practical and wise advice. Oh, if I had followed them without fail – no matter how much time I would have lost, no matter how many mistakes I had made …
Denisov was undoubtedly a composer who developed the “Russian idea” in music, that is, the specificity of the national was not alien to him, but on the contrary – in his music itself and in his oral and written statements he repeatedly reminded of the sources that nourished his work, of purely Russian comprehension of the idea of musical (infinite) space, about the method of “branching”, proceeding from the heterophonic principle of folk music playing, about his artistic principle – “from darkness to light”, about his purely Russian way of getting out of the tragic dark surroundings into a sunny valley, replete with a warmth of understanding, inspired by love and ascent to the light. Denisov’s aesthetic principles go back more to Russian traditions than to French, for the beauty of his music is not an end in itself, but there is an organic part of the composer’s thinking, as well as his desire for optimistic plot refractions in near-program music … I recall an interesting detail: where at the beginning of the 80s, on the chamber music section, Edison Vasilievich showed his new vocal cycle to Pushkin’s verses “Your appearance is pretty,” in which Denisov’s new style and aesthetic searches were clearly identified. A lively discussion ensued. In particular, Nikolai Korndorf reproached the composer for moving away from the “avant-garde line” towards academicism, to which Denisov replied (retelling in his own words) – I see the movement forward not in search of clever means, but primarily in accordance with the content of the verses of the great Russian poet and adequate national music field, and my “academician” is that same novelty … It seems to me that this immense theme of national thinking, which you can’t ignore in any way, still only opens up, but in the work of the great ma Stera – Denisova – it is determined indirectly but sometimes sometimes directly. So the composer does not use folklore quotes anywhere, avoids false decorativeness “under Russia”, but the unusual-open relaxedness of his thoughts, the flowing winged freedom of expression, the breadth and volume of creative ideas, the color and multispheric nature of his instrumental paintings gives him Russian origin …
The composer’s creative heritage is vast and immense. In most works, one way or another, the intonation of the author’s monogram ES-E-D-C intersperses as if confirming: I say this, I think this, I hear and see this. For all the stylistic originality (and Denisov’s music cannot be confused with other composers), each composition is marked by its figuratively-meaningful and “material” originality, a variety of concepts and the presence of “parallel fields”. And nowhere does the feeling of “accomplishment” arise: music flows easily and freely, smoothly avoiding obstacles in its path without “joints” and stops. The image-emotional sphere of Denisov’s works is spectral, that is, each of them captures its own unique “stream of consciousness”, a stream of musical thoughts under the primacy of the original, which intertwine to form a curly unfading “solemn wreath”. Most often, the development, “overcoming the material” is carried out not by introducing contrast, but proceeding from the initial potential, where the variant transformation method becomes the main method. Laconicism and aphoristic thinking of the composer dictates the originality of dramaturgy and unconventional conceptual thinking.
