Andrei Golovin: Symphonic Works

Andrei Golovin: The Orchestra as Memory and Revelation

To speak of contemporary Russian symphonic music is to speak less of a single school than of an argument carried across generations. The political and institutional order that had given the symphony exceptional public importance during the Soviet period did not simply bequeath one successor language. After its dissolution, composers worked amid a far more fractured culture: experimental procedures, postmodern quotation, renewed tonality, sacred imagery and the older discipline of symphonic development could now coexist, sometimes within the same score. Yet the familiar oppositions—Russia and the West, tradition and innovation, public rhetoric and private utterance—remain inadequate. Russian music has always been formed through exchange as much as through resistance, and the symphony has often provided the arena in which inherited forms are made to bear the pressure of present experience.

His formative memories disclose the breadth of that inheritance. Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony first reawakened his childhood attachment to music; Ravel’s G-major Piano Concerto brought him decisively back to it. As a young composer he was fascinated by Ravel’s harmony, then by Messiaen and Scriabin, three very different figures united, in his account, by an unmistakably personal harmonic language and an extraordinary sense of colour. His later friendship with Boris Tchaikovsky placed him close to another, less internationally familiar Russian lineage, one running through Myaskovsky, Prokofiev and Sviridov and distinguished by exacting formal thought and an intensely individual ear for the orchestra. French luminosity, Scriabinesque tension and Russian symphonism are therefore not competing allegiances in Golovin’s music; they are elements of a single, assimilated grammar.

Golovin has described the composer as an investigator whose notes function like a scientist’s formulae. The comparison is revealing. He does not begin with a verbal programme and subsequently clothe it in sound. A work grows from a purely musical idea, often no more than a melodic cell, which must possess sufficient depth to unfold, yet must also submit to the laws of form. His objections to concept-led avant-gardism are severe, but he is equally dismissive of agreeable, inert ‘new tonal music’. What he seeks is neither novelty as theatre nor consonance as comfort, but a musical thought capable of changing consciousness. This aesthetic has an ethical and, explicitly, Christian dimension. For Golovin, composition entails responsibility towards the listener and gratitude for existence; form is not an academic casing applied to emotion, but the discipline through which emotion becomes answerable.

The three works gathered here, composed between 2018 and 2022, reveal that mature language under different conditions. They do not constitute a programme in the narrative sense, yet they form a compelling triptych. A Celestial Settlement considers the possibility of transcendence through orchestral mass and light; the Sinfonia Concertante places a solitary, breath-bound voice within a collective body; Antiphons turns grief, faith and remembrance into an architecture of response. Across all three, Golovin treats the orchestra neither as a sumptuous surface nor as an impersonal machine. It is a community of distinct voices, able to gather into monumental sonority and to withdraw, just as significantly, into the exposed line of a single instrument.

The designation ‘symphonic fresco’ is essential to A Celestial Settlement. A fresco is conceived on a broad field: its figures, colours and planes are apprehended together even when the eye encounters them successively. Golovin’s fifteen-minute work behaves in a comparable way. Rather than illustrating a celestial city or recounting a spiritual ascent, it establishes a large acoustic space in which strata of sound accumulate, erode and reappear. Dense orchestral matter is repeatedly opened from within; luminosity seems generated by harmonic friction rather than laid over the music as an effect. The title thus names less a place than a condition of hearing—a habitation glimpsed through resistance. The work carries forward a late twentieth-century European conception of the orchestra, with its concern for weight, register and evolving sonorous fields, while retaining melodic direction and tonal gravity. Conducted here by the composer, the Symphony Orchestra of Radio and TV Moscow gives the music the breadth its fresco-like conception demands without obscuring its inner lines.

The Sinfonia Concertante for Oboe and Symphony Orchestra approaches the same question of the individual and the whole from another angle. Its title deliberately holds two principles in suspension. The concerto conventionally projects a protagonist against an orchestral ground; the symphonic principle requires every element, including the soloist, to participate in a larger process of transformation. Golovin allows the oboe to remain recognisably human, its phrase shaped by breath, its timbre poised between pastoral warmth and penetrating complaint, while refusing to reduce the orchestra to accompaniment. The solo line emerges from the surrounding texture, contests it, is absorbed by it and returns altered. Virtuosity belongs to the argument rather than interrupting it. In Maria Sournatcheva’s performance, with the Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra under Alexander Rudin, the oboe’s eloquence is balanced by the ensemble’s chamber-like definition: colour remains transparent even when the musical pressure intensifies. The result is not a display piece with symphonic trappings, but a concentrated drama of speech and response.

Antiphons in Memory of Archpriest Mikhail Pravdolyubov is the most openly personal work of the three. Golovin met Father Mikhail in the early 1990s at the Church of the Resurrection of Christ in Sokolniki, Moscow, where the priest served for twenty-seven years. Their shared love of classical music deepened the relationship, and Pravdolyubov eventually became the composer’s spiritual father. His sudden death in 2017 was, Golovin has recalled in correspondence for this release, both a shock and a lifelong tragedy. The score written the following year does not convert that loss into private confession alone. By invoking the antiphon, the alternation of answering voices within Orthodox worship, it places individual mourning inside a communal and ritual form.

Its five movements are symmetrically arranged: Antiphon I, Chant I, Antiphon II, Chant II and Antiphon III. In the three antiphonal movements, phrases pass between orchestral groups, initially in smaller bodies and later across complete sections, translating liturgical procedure into symphonic syntax. The two Chants are freer. Chant I ends without the expected completion, a structural wound reflecting the suddenness of Pravdolyubov’s death. Chant II, the longest movement and the work’s culmination, grows from a single trochaic figure: what begins in quiet concentration expands inexorably towards a fortissimo summit. The power of this design lies in its refusal of facile consolation. Solitary lines, unisons and bell-like punctuation acquire the force of witnesses; light is audible, but never innocent of pain. Golovin does not pour grief into the orchestra. He measures it, gives it intervals, assigns it answering voices, and thereby permits remembrance to become something that can be shared.

He conducts the Symphony Orchestra of Radio and TV Moscow in both A Celestial Settlement and Antiphons; the Sinfonia Concertante is entrusted to Rudin, a friend and long-standing advocate whose collaboration with Golovin reaches back across several decades. The differing performing forces sharpen the character of each score: monumental breadth in the two composer-led works, alert conversational clarity in the concertante piece. More importantly, the album traces a coherent movement of thought. A dwelling beyond sight is first imagined through orchestral light; a single voice then seeks its place within the collective; finally, voices answer one another across absence. This is contemporary Russian symphonism without costume or slogan. Its modernity lies in the demands it places upon tradition, inherited forms are neither repudiated nor preserved intact, but made to carry the weight of memory, spiritual doubt and lived time.