Extending its cultural expansion to countries that gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Aksenov Family Foundation has staged a concert in Baku comprising seven new musical works by contemporary Russian and Azerbaijani composers, under the title of ‘Con Tempo’, celebrating five years of a unique grant programme called Russian Music 2.0.

‘Con Tempo. Contemporary music here and now’ was a sell out concert staged recently at the Mugam Centre of Baku. The programme included seven world premieres by composers all of whom were former prize winners of the Russian Music 2.0 programme: Mark Buloshnikov (b. 1990), Oleg Krokhalev (b. 1992), Daria Maminova (b. 1988), Marina Poleukhina (b. 1989) and Alexey Sysoyev (b. 1972), and Azerbaijani composers Turkar Gasimzada (b. 1988) and Said Gani (b. 1983) and the event promised adventurous local audiences a raw, innovative, and diverse musical feast.

The Baku Contemporary Music Society widely promoted it in the Azeri capital city, and there was the added pull of the Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music (MASM) led by Yaroslav Timofeev (b. 1988) from the Moscow Philharmonic. Today in Baku there is a real taste for radical and unconventional music in part thanks to the efforts of the Baku Contemporary Music Society founded by composer Turkar Gasimzada, with audiences there now very accustomed to innovative performative practices, unconventional instrumentation, unusual timbres and methods of sound production, and games with noises and electroacoustic effects.

An expert panel organised by the Foundation at the Museum Centre of Baku, an imposing columned and domed Stalinist building was tasked with bringing new names in Russian music to Azerbaijan, most composers who had taken part in a five-year programme. The panel turned into a broad discussion attended by Dmitry Aksenov, director Victoria Kondrashova, music expert Dmitry Renansky and six of the seven composers, all of whom were former laureates of the Russian Music 2.0 programme, whose works were included in ‘Con Tempo’ that evening.

After introductions by each composer a member of the expert council of the Russian Music 2.0 programme presented the project ‘Tower of Babel’, a collaboration with Klangforum Wien, an exploration of musical composition today across the territories of the former Soviet republics and discussions around cultural dialogues between different musical traditions. Conversation touched upon the problems of cultural interaction between Russian and Azerbaijani composers and, more broadly, the musical communities of neighbouring countries on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Building a new cultural identity over the past three decades since the collapse of the Soviet empire has been a long and painful process in the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Whereas previously the role of a cultural brace was played by the USSR Composers’ Union and its network of branches in Russia and further afield, immediately after perestroika musicians and creatives in the newly formed states found themselves virtually alienated from wider global processes taking place in the international music scene.

All the musical compositions presented in the programme of the evening concert, ‘Con tempo’ – the name alluding to the need to ‘keep up with the times’ – were composed this year and all are completely different formed by distinctive creative approaches, seven sound worlds standing for a kaleidoscope of compositional techniques. The program resembled a colorful bouquet, in which modest wild flowers coexist with garden flowers, lilies of the valley with cornflowers, roses with daisies. Yet although each work is completely independent, taken together they form a panorama of composers’ searches and experiments, from electronic and electroacoustic music to outright performance and kitsch.

In the panel discussion earlier in the day, musicologist Dmitry Renansky had talked of ‘ecosystems’ and ‘cartographies of contemporary music’, alluding to how the grant programme was all about nurturing and growing the Russian musical field to create an ecosystem of Russian music, irrespective of whether its creators live in Russia or abroad. It was a feat of musical curation to piece the seven works together to create a dramaturgy with some inherent logic inspite of the challenging diversity.

The concert started with works by Mark Buloshnikov and Oleg Krokhalev which were characterised by silence and emptiness, compositions with many pauses and airy, transparent and melting sonorities. Buloshnikov presented a vocal-instrumental cycle consisting of miniatures and quick sketches with Krokhalev, on the other hand, preferring a kind of sophisticated musical play with static, lasting sound structures or sonic kinetic sculptures.

The prefix (Not) in Buloshnikov's work ‘(Not) Possible Songs’ suggests on one level that in our unstable, disintegrating world today lines by the most famous Russian classic poets like Lermontov, Pushkin and Tyutchev seem unreal, having lost their original meaning. Scraps of phrases float out of the quiet instrumental sound: “In the fog... in the fog of the sea... blue”, “What he sees...”, “Rattling in the distance...”, “The snow is still white in the fields...”. The clear diatonic melody in the spirit of Valentin Sylvestrov's (b. 1937) ‘Quiet Songs’ against a barely audible guitar backing broke off now and then, and silence came back time and again. Delicate instrumental colouring, understatement, reflection and shy intonation coloured the work in subtle pastel tones.

‘Home in Winter’ is the title of Oleg Krokhalev’s composition written to the text ‘Letter to a Friend’ taken from the fifth book of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll series. Moomin is bored and writes a letter to a friend: it is winter and very cold outside. With a light humorous touch Krokhalev conveys the state of winter torpor: strips of metal are connected to the piano and electric guitar, through which an electric charge is sent, the instruments become independent actors, as if they are producing sound by themselves, creating an iridescent sound continuum: a kinetic sound object-installation. It harks back to famous musical depictions of cold in the Baroque era such as Henry Purcell’s (1659–1695) ‘Cold Genius Song’ from ‘King Arthur’ semi-opera and ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi's famous cycle of violin concertos ‘The Four Seasons’.

There are further references to the baroque in Azerbaijani composer Turkar Gasimzada’s ‘Interlude for Rainforest IV’ which refers to Dido's final aria from Purcell's opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’. The air blown from the bass saxophone and the rustling noises of the laconic ensemble, saxophone, cello, violin and piano, perfectly imitate the sound of rain, in the central section a piccolo accompanied by the piano played by Mikhail Dubov (b. 1966).

The first section of the concert ended in Daria Maminova’s ‘Suddenly from tree...’ with poems by Paul Levy and Georgy Ivanov and in which Maminova herself performed as a soloist, her voice leaning either to jazz song or unbridled pop and playfully hovering between kitsch and academia. In contrast, Marina Poleukhina's work ‘See water as sugar’ is uncompromising. Referencing Marina Abramovic’s (b. 1946) iconic performance in New York's MoMA, Poleukhina did a powerful performance with the vocal quartet N'Caged. There was no musical notation, except for the rhythmic structures and speech intonations which conveyed a range of emotional states, from horror and anxiety to surprise, happiness and admiration. Subtitled ‘Designed for four freedom-loving performers’ it was a form of total art in which sung – or rather, spoken – words interact with various objects, facial expressions, physical gestures, and movements in space. A table with objects of uncertain use was placed before the performers on the stage, at the side and down below there were percussionists pounding on big tin cans, tin dishes, and toy buckets.

There was a myriad of sounds such as breathing, wheezing, hiccuping, mooing, clacking, and clicking, and an insistent repetition of words – wish, suppose, same, how, where – all spoken with different emotional colours, from gentle affection to raw aggression. Many in the audience were shocked by the performance and Poleukhina played on their emotions replacing notes and the natural sound of instruments with rhythms of breathing, cries and gestures.

Azerbaijani composer Said Gani named his work ‘Paraidolia’ alluding to the paranoia in horror films, where the signature technique of music is suspense and anxiety and the expectation of something terrible.

An apt finale to the concert was Alexey Sysoyev’s ‘Apocalypse Online’, based on the Revelation of John the Apostle, a text from the last book of the New Testament, which describes the end of the world, is infused with a sense escatological dread, although interpreted in a straightforward manner. Sysoyev is a composer with a jazz background and has created a spectacular composition in which rumbling percussion creates a multi-layered rhythmic continuum that nearly drowns out the voices of the soloists. In Sysoyev's score, the jazz trumpet represented the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse, heralding calamity, as the composer explains: “The Apocalypse is happening now, but no one notices it, because everyone is sitting in front of their TV screens which are playing entertaining music”. It is a familiar situation of “feast in the time of the plague” in a contemporary way.