The Spirit Lives

This special edition is a tribute to Sergey Kuryokhin, who passed away on July 9, 1996. The concert was recorded at the State Conservatory with a full orchestra conducted by Alexei Aigui, who also arranged Kuryokhin’s music for such a large ensemble.

Alexei Aigui:

“I never attended a single Kuryokhin concert, nor did I ever see a Pop-Mechanics performance. So it is difficult to say where and when I first saw or heard him—on the TV program Musical Ring? On an Aquarium album, to which he brought such a touch of madness that, after him, Leningrad rock finally became music?

My only meeting with Kuryokhin was brief. There was some concert at the Central House of Artists organized by Nikolai Dmitriev, who at the time was planning to launch the Long Arms label together with Kuryokhin—a label which, incidentally, later released one of my first records. I went backstage to talk to Kolya about something, and Kuryokhin was sitting there. We greeted each other, Kuryokhin smiled. That was the whole encounter.

Kuryokhin did not engage in serious compositional work in the sense of sitting down and writing music for posterity, for eternity. He literally wrote music on the fly, just before a concert, scribbling things down on scraps of paper and explaining the general direction to the musicians. As a result, there is no sheet music—practically everything has been lost. Even the wonderful Sparrow Oratorio, which was once performed with an orchestra—everything is gone, all the parts. When Nastya Kuryokhina called me and we began talking about reconstructing the music, we tried to find something, but to no avail.

Apparently, the scores were simply thrown away after the recording or performance. I know how it is from my own experience: musicians often leave their music on their stands, and I’m always going around after everyone collecting it.

So reconstructing the music by ear was quite an ordeal. I was inundated with tracks and excerpts from films in which the characters are talking over the music. Little by little, I transcribed and orchestrated all of it—I nearly went insane by the time of the premiere.

I did not try to remake Kuryokhin’s music, as professional arrangers often do. I did not try to embellish it or turn it into a ‘symphonic poem.’ I neither know how to do that nor like doing it. What mattered most to me was simply conveying Sergey’s music to the listener in a form as close as possible to the original. I was pleased when Letov and Gayvoronsky, both of whom worked extensively with Kuryokhin, told me that my interpretation was very close to Kuryokhin himself.

Some passages in Kuryokhin’s music are extremely difficult to decipher—improvisations mixed with orchestral music. And when they are played by, say, Volkov and Gayvoronsky, who weave themselves into the sonic texture with such skill, it becomes very difficult to untangle. You have to pull them—Volkov and Gayvoronsky—back out of that texture so that you can write out parts for ordinary musicians. And they cling to it by their overtones: just listen to Volkov’s double bass! And Gayvoronsky? Not a straightforward note anywhere.

In the end, at the premiere at Gogol Center, two or three hours before the concert, I was still sitting there printing out the music. The printer was next to the conductor’s podium, while an assistant ran around handing the parts out to the orchestra.

When we first performed the Kuryokhin program in St. Petersburg, several people in the audience began to cry, and someone even became physically unwell. They had not heard this music performed live for so many years that, for a moment, many of them felt as though Kuryokhin himself were conducting onstage. Not because I look like him, but because the atmosphere suddenly came together: musicians from Pop-Mechanics were playing—Letov, Kasparyan, Gayvoronsky, Volkov—a man was rushing around the stage among the orchestra, and they had the overwhelming sensation that they had returned to that time.

Kuryokhin stands apart and resists being placed on a pedestal. He belongs neither to the jazz tradition, nor to rock, nor to the academic tradition. He tore through all of these circles like a meteorite, leaving behind more memories than music. His intelligence and talent simply erupted from him, and that was why he broke into areas where no one before him had even dared to venture. He worked not so much with musical styles as with entire strata of public consciousness.

Not all of his music can be translated into a concert or notated format. Kuryokhin cannot be performed by an ordinary symphony orchestra—it would be lifeless. The program we created loses half of its charm without the original members of Pop-Mechanics, because Kuryokhin took the individuality of every musician into account, whether he was writing for a recording or a concert.

And it has to be said that Kuryokhin possessed an absolutely unique melodic gift: he could build an entire story around one or two notes. With very sparse means—slightly altering the harmony—he created extraordinarily expressive music.

Of course, I included Kuryokhin’s best-known pieces in the program—Donna Anna and several famous Pop-Mechanics themes. To these I added the music that affected me most personally. There were pieces I very much wanted to do but which were extremely difficult to realize—for example, the music from Balabanov’s The Castle. It is very beautiful and strange, but it was written for these peculiar, out-of-tune old harmoniums and seems to exist somewhere between the notes.

This will be only the second time in my life that I perform in the Conservatory’s Grand Hall. The first time was when I played in a student orchestra and was the only person in the entire orchestra to come in one bar too early. I remember it well—that loud, solitary note of mine. Although, sometime in the late 1980s, I also took part in the filming of some movie on the Conservatory stage, as an extra sitting in the orchestra. What if Kuryokhin’s music was being played there?

Since I do not belong to the circle of academic musicians, do not understand how to play jazz, and my music cannot be called rock either, the only thing I can say about myself is to quote Kuryokhin’s brilliant line: ‘The classical musicians thought I was a rocker, the rockers thought I was a jazzman, and the jazzmen thought I was an asshole.’”

Sergey Kuryokhin’s first record was released by Leo Records. The recording had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

It is Leo Records that is releasing this recording of the concert commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the death of this outstanding musician.

Performed by Alexei Aigui and Ensemble 4'33''.

The original edition consists of a CD containing the music and a DVD featuring a video recording of the concert.