Im Spiegel V: Spiegel. Träume oder Kleines Leben» (2021)
Ballett in konzertanter Aufführung (European Premiere)
Program note:
The entire program is dedicated to the music of contemporary Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Poleva, who celebrates her 60th birthday on the same day.
The Ukrainian premiere of Dreams was a great success at the international contemporary music festival Bouquet in Kyiv in 2021. The audience in St. Gallen will experience the European premiere of the work Spiegel. Dreams, or a Small Life for the first time.
It is a very personal, intimate musical narrative, like a mirror of her own life, seen through the composer’s eyes: “It was an opportunity to go back 27 years. Even if only in a dream.”
From the beginning of the war until the end of March 2022, Victoria stayed in Kyiv and, like many others, experienced the horror of air raid sirens and explosions.
Since April 2022, the composer has been living in the community of Disentis, Switzerland.
Poleva’s work is performed by the chamber orchestra Sinfonietta St. Gallen, which consists of first-class Swiss and Ukrainian musicians who fled Ukraine because of the war. The 25-member orchestra made its debut on 03.07.2022 at the Lokremise St. Gallen in the TRISTIUM concert of the IM SPIEGEL music series.
Victoria Poleva’s works are part of the repertoire of many leading musicians today, especially Gidon Kremer, and have been performed in the best concert halls worldwide.
VICTORIA VITA POLEVÁ
In the late 1990s, Victoria Polevá gave up her successful career as an avant-garde composer of polyphonic music and began to question—and eventually transform—her aesthetic ideals and spirituality, in search of the “absoluteness of renunciation, the purity of experiment.” By intertwining sacred and secular texts and musical traditions from many eras, Polevá has established herself as one of the most original composers of Ukraine and Eastern Europe, whose works are frequently performed by leading ensembles and soloists around the world.
In 2005, violinist Gidon Kremer included Polevá’s Warm Wind in his concert cycle Sempre Primavera. In her first English-language interview, Victoria Polevá speaks about her bold development as a composer, the origins of her passion, her collaboration with Kremer, and grief as a creative act. (Music & Literature, Taylor Davis-Van Atta)
Polevá’s compositions include symphonic music, choral music, and chamber music. In her early works, she embraced an avant-garde aesthetic and explored polystylistic contrasts. Representative compositions include the ballet Gagaku, Transform for symphony orchestra, and Epiphany for chamber ensemble. From the late 1990s onwards, her music has increasingly been associated with “sacred minimalism.”
An important aspect of Polevá’s work is her intense engagement with liturgical texts and their musical setting.
Program:
Victoria Vita Poleva
Träume oder Kleines Leben» (2021) , Ballett in konzertanter Aufführung (European Premiere)
Musicians:
Sinfonietta Sankt Gallen,
Mikheil Menabde, conductor