Silas Friesen, UBC MMus Grad Recital
Silas Friesen, trumpet, with Godwin Friesen, piano
Unlike Stravinsky, Sergei Vasilenko is little-known and not often performed outside his native Russia. Like Stravinsky, he pursued music while studying law (at Moscow University) but instead of emigration became quite integrated with the musical activity of his country, receiving high acclaim from the Soviet government (Order of the Red Banner, Stalin Prize). His music is often described as having a mystical quality, and influences range from Russian folk music and poetry to ancient religious music to Eastern exoticism.
His Concerto in C minor, sometimes listed as Concert-Poem for Trumpet and Orchestra, is a startlingly beautiful entry in the canon of trumpet works, and one that deserves much broader performance. It carries some of the hallmarks of 20th-century Russian composition, but Vasilenko’s certain harmonic sensitivity and creative lushness of orchestration set this concerto apart from, for example, its slightly younger Arutiunian cousin. The first movement (Allegro drammatico) opens with a bold fanfare, its large dissonant leaps setting the stage for an angular main subject and an achingly passionate secondary theme that rotate and transform throughout. Vasilenko further develops the latter in the second movement (Molto sostenuto, quasi adagio)—a gradually shifting and transmuting cluster of color that, in the original orchestration, moves from flutes and clarinets to double reeds to strings to warm low brass. The melody, mirroring this constant change, moves from a soft open fifth to distant harmonic territory and back again, adrift in time as a mote of dust in a sunbeam. In the last movement (Allegro vivace) another transformation of character occurs—the mote becomes a hummingbird-like theme, swooping and darting and calling forth echoes from the first movement, until the brilliant cascade of the very first fanfare. Though Vasilenko may not have imagined this concerto as a sacred work, the listener might catch glimpses of something akin to the dancing illuminations of stained glass.
