23 November 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR

The days had gotten genuinely quite short in Italy- it was barely four in the afternoon when I took this picture from the freestanding Campanile of Florence’s iconic Duomo. When I was not even twenty years old, I lived in Florence for a month; it made no sense, as I commuted to Siena on a daily basis and thus spent more time on trains than actually in the city. I thus experienced very little of it, deciding, somewhat correctly, that it was a theme park for tourists, mostly Americans, following the footsteps of Dante, the Medici, and so on. It is perhaps more egregiously that today, but to be fair, I never gave it much of a chance and can’t imagine when I next will have the chance. This trip was all-too-brief, to hear my String Quartet no 2 (2024) performed by Quatuor Arod in the stunning Teatro Niccolini, Florence’s oldest theatre. And apart from the brilliant performance, I was surprised by the many compliments the work received from the audience. Short though it was, the piece attempts to condense the ethos of the Szymanowski Second String Quartet into a brief encore, but it’s by no means a derivative. Using the harmonic and melodic material of the Szymanowski as a starting point, the music takes you into a stratospherically high world of its own. Perfect for that Florence back-drop then.

The Florence performance was preceded by a lecture, discussion, and screening of Russia : Today (2020) at the University of Oxford. Though it seems that anything with the word Russia in it, positive or negative, elicits some kinds of visceral reactions from the pretend-Jacobins on college campuses, it was still nicely attended especially by old and new friends- the lecture was almost a reunion for me, and the chance to stroll down High Street on an early Saturday morning and remember the five years spent at Oxford as a doctoral student and, later, graduate. Almost nothing has changed, or will change. And there is something to be valued in that, too.

But one valid realisation I made on that day was the fact that the film is almost, or maybe simply is, the more powerful version of the entire show. As I prepare the next live performance of the project which will take place in Berlin in May 2025 with EXAUDI yet again, the connection between (live) music and visuals, of constant currency in my projects, will seem three-plus years into the war in Ukraine. Or will there still be war? One hopes, after all the suffering and destruction, a work on Russia – this work on Russia, which fundamentally marks its death and hopeful rebirth – could actually reflect a positive moment in world history, where such a transfiguration can occur.