Alexander Ivashkin conductor
Mariano Nuñez West sound engineer and producer
Lydia Kavina theremin
Drosostalitsa Moraiti shumophone
Andri Hadjiandreou crystadin
Rebecca Wiles camerton piano
Emma Firth, Hannah Cott, Magdalini Nikolaidou, Magdalena Kryzanowska ekvodins

Schnittke Concerto for Electronic Instruments

Allegro moderato | Allegretto | Andante

Schnittke used electro-musical¹ instruments with their typically artificial, exotic and alien sounds in his early orchestral piece Poem about Space, inspired by Yuri Gagarin¹s first space flight in 1961. Electric musical instruments were quite popular in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s (and up to the early 1980s), both for classical and pop music.

In 1960 Schnittke wrote his Concerto for Electric Instruments for the Orchestra of Electric Instruments led by Vyacheslav Meshcherin (1923-1995). The score, only recently discovered in Schnittke¹s family archive, includes the electric (or camerton) piano, the crystadin, the termenvox or theremin, and the shumophone (noise-maker). The termenvox was invented in the1920s by the Soviet engineer Lev Theremin (1896- 1993) and was used by Charles Ives in the score of his Fourth Symphony in 1929, when Theremin lived and worked in the USA. Two solo instruments, the camerton piano and the crystadin, are accompanied by the theremin, shumophone and four ekvodins. This latter instrument, still available and in working condition at the Theremin Centre in Moscow, was a sort of electric organ with some of the features of a string instrument, such as a fingerboard, and with the possibility of playing vibrato. The ekvodin, one of the very first analogue synthesizers, was invented in 1937. In his concerto Schnittke uses four ekvodins like a string quartet. The next Russian synthesiser, ANS ( named after the composer Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin), was invented in 1938 and used by Schnittke for his only electro-acoustic piece, Stream (1969), which you can hear on a loop in the foyer today.

It was not practicable to bring the original electric instruments from Moscow (in any case, many of them are not in working condition). For this performance we shall imitate the original timbres on synthesizers and keyboards, following the invaluable advice of Andrei Smirnov, Head of the Theremin Centre in Moscow. The theremin part will be played by Lev Theremin¹s grand niece, Lydia Kavina.

Booking
This event is free but tickets are required. Please note if you wish to book online you will need to enter your card details but you will not be charged. Alternatively you can book by phone or in person.



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