A musician immigrated to Germany, without whom Ukraine’ s current music life seems incomplete
The People’s Artist of Ukraine Ihor Blazhkov worked with different performing groups from Kyiv at different periods. In 1963-68, he was with the symphony orchestra of Leningrad’s philharmonic society then under the guidance of the celebrated Yevgeny Mravinsky. He was a reputed conductor and contemporary composers would entrust him with their manuscripts practically as soon as they had finished writing the music. He was an enlightener and an indefatigable researcher in the realm of music, locating and restoring forgotten masterpieces of world music literature. He has performed a total of 700 music pieces during his career in the Soviet Union and after the empire collapsed. He was uncompromisingly principled; he said what he thought. This won him a lot of enemies among colleagues. He was dismissed as chief conductor of the national symphony orchestra “because of staff cut-backs” (which sounds ridiculous even under the circumstances). Over the past couple of years Ihor Blazhkov has had no permanent job, living on 130 hryvnias ($25) a month, like most Ukrainian pensioners. He conducted the Perpetuum Mobile chamber orchestra in Ukraine from 1983 till the last months, but their performances were sporadic — whenever they found money for the concert. Music lovers would not miss a single one, because every concert featured pieces never previously performed. Also because admittance was free. It was Ihor Blazhkov’s principled stand. He firmly believed that making impoverished intellectuals pay for listening to classical music was a sin, because these people could hardly keep body and soul together.
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Ihor Blazhkov is described as a living encyclopedia. One can listen to stories about his meetings with outstanding musicians for hours. In 1998, he conducted a master class at a composer’s home in Vorzel and told everybody interested about his meetings with Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Liatoshynsky, repeating the stories for several days. Now this living encyclopedia is available to Germans — they are sure to pay well for a musician who loved his homeland and proved this love with both words and deeds, and who had every right to be loved in return. We his fellow countrymen are left only with recordings of his radio appearances, old LPs, and modern CDs made in Ukraine and abroad. Also with interviews taken at different periods.
“At that time — now referred to as the stagnation period of Brezhnev-Suslov-our society continued to live behind the iron curtain. You dug up music by old masters never previously performed, you brought them back to life, thus somehow making up for our forced remoteness from the world cultural process. You are still on this noble mission, reviving undeservedly forgotten music.”
“Yes, I have been after gems of Western European music, accumulating dust in the archives of Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, Berlin, and of course Kyiv. I made microfilm copies of the scores I found and then proceeded to restore them little by little — I mean transcribing them, making them comprehensible to modern musicians. Old music orthography has a lot of abbreviations and conventional signs. I used to spend hours with a magnifying glass, trying to figure out what the author actually meant. Also, the instruments were not always specified. Some of the old compositions were meant for a particular church and its orchestra. They were performed by different orchestras at different cathedrals, meaning that sometimes I had to do the orchestration as well.”
“You used to correspond with Igor Stravinsky, you even met with him, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. We met when he visited the Soviet Union in 1962. I was at the Leningrad philharmonic society, invited to conduct rehearsals with the orchestra that he would appear with in concert. Stravinsky music had been outlawed and none of the orchestras knew it. After he arrived, I would attend every concert and we often met. I have photographs with him.”
“How did Stravinsky impress you? He was well advanced in years at the time.”
“He had just celebrated his 80th birthday, but he never looked his age. He was charged with energy. His assistant, professional conductor Robert Kraft, looked more bent under the weight of the years. Stravinsky was agile, cheerful, always smiling and ready to crack a joke. After the dress rehearsal, he met with young composers. The celebrity told them about contemporary composing techniques: dodecaphony, electronic and concrete music. We knew nothing at the time. Stravinsky then recalled meeting with the French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, Russian composers Sergey Taneyev and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. I will never forget those meetings. He looked as though he would live forever.”
“You have also met with another 20th century giant, Dmitry Shostakovich.”
“Right. We first met in Moscow. I conducted Kyiv composer Leonid Hrabovsky’s premiere of his Symphony Frescoes at the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. Shostakovich was in the audience. He was known for closely following young talent, both in Moscow and elsewhere in the Soviet republics. After the concert, he came to congratulate me and thus we met. I was then with the Leningrad philharmonic society and was eager to perform his music, but the undeclared monopoly belonged to the chief conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky. And the man was truly an outstanding Shostakovich performer. He had turned the philharmonic society into a kind of temple dedicated to the composer. So I applyed myself to the great composer’s works that had somehow sunk into oblivion. They had been performed once but the press had lashed out at them so no one would ever try them again. I mean his second and third symphonies. I revived them and performed them. Dmitry Shostakovich attended both the rehearsals and concerts in Leningrad.”
“What was the brilliant composer Shostakovich like — I mean in his daily life?”
“I know of no other individual like him, of all the outstanding personalities I have met or read about. He was often persecuted by authorities and dismissed from work, leaving him and his family without daily bread. Yet he was never indifferent to the misfortunes of other people. He helped everybody who appealed to him for aid. He would know something was wrong and helped them without being asked. He would visit countless bureaucratic offices until he would finally have his way. You must agree, we don’t have many like him these days. He was like that because his music was always humane.”
