|
|
Itar-Tass
Veronika Dolina is among the classic performers appearing this weekend at the Bard-song festival.
|
|
|
Living Legends
Thirty years ago, guitar-strumming bards had to peddle their music on the sly. Now, Russia's "singing poets" play before audiences of thousands.
By Anna Arutiunova
Published: June 4, 2004
After decades spent on the cultural periphery, bard singing has found a new niche among contemporary youth. This weekend, legendary bards from the past, including Alexander Gorodnitsky, Alexander Dulov, Veronika Dolina and Natalya Dudkina, will join forces with today's up-and-coming singers at the Kolomenskoye Estate Museum for an all-out homage to the art form that the most legendary bard of them all, Bulat Okudzhava, once termed "an expression of a cry that most people keep to themselves."
Slated to be held this weekend for the third year in a row, the Moscow Open Festival of Bard Singing is expected to draw some 10,000 fans -- twice the number that braved heavy rain for last year's show. Organizers have included something to suit everyone's taste, from Friday evening's kick-off gala concert of wartime patriotic songs to the final round of this year's Moscow Bard Singing Contest, scheduled for Saturday evening. The festival closes out with another concert Sunday, featuring a wide range of classic and contemporary singers.
"Compared to last year, this festival will go in a different direction," said Tatyana Matalina, president of the City Center of Bard Singing, which organized the festival together with the Valery Grushin Foundation and the Russian Bard Organization. "There will be none of the blitz contests that we hold once every two years. What we want to do is to display the results of a year of our work, we've held thirty competitions [this year] and now are giving the winners a chance to manifest their talents."
Bard singing, or avtorskaya pesnya, originated in the 1940s as the liberal "voice of the city intelligentsia," and was jumpstarted in the 1960s during Nikita Khrushchev's cultural thaw. Songs tended to center around themes of solidarity, human rights, and freedom of thought as an alternative to mass culture, and were therefore never thoroughly acknowledged by the Soviet regime. With the advent of cassette recordings and perestroika, however, bard singing became a mass phenomenon, and Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich household names.
Unlike 30 years ago, bard singing today is no clandestine affair. The annual Valery Grushin Festival of Bard Singing, now in its 31st year, regularly draws more than 130,000 viewers to the shores of the Volga River, while the City Center of Bard Singing industriously collects old recordings and organizes concerts, festivals, expositions and conferences in search of new talent.
"The main goal of this festival is constant: We are trying to discover and publicize new faces that fulfill the highest standards of music and poetry," Matalina said.
Indeed, according to Alexander Sherbina, a 32-year-old prize-winning bard who will perform at the festival, today's bard music offers a healthy antidote to mass-produced pop culture for Russia's youth. This has as much to do with a newly personal, confessional approach as with changes in musical style.
"Today we greatly value the individuality of the author," Sherbina said. "Today's bard is more than just a poet with a guitar, because we now have the opportunity to draw from a diverse genre palette, including rock, ethnic music, and jazz."
The Moscow Open Festival of Bard Singing runs Friday through Sunday at the Kolomenskoye Estate Museum, located at 39 Prospekt Andropova. Metro Kolomenskaya. Tel. 114-6779, 115-8705.
Copyright © 2004 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
|
June 27 - July 3, 2008 
