Troika

Troika: Russia's westerly poetry in three orchestral song cycles is a 2011 album of contemporary classical songs performed by soprano Julia Kogan, who also conceived the project. She is accompanied by The St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic conducted by Jeffery Meyer. The songs are set to Russian, English, and French language poetry by five classic Russian writers: Joseph Brodsky, Mikhail Lermontov, Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksandr Pushkin and Fyodor Tyutchev. Eight modern composers, from France, Russia, and the United States, wrote music for the album: Isabelle Aboulker, Ivan Barbotin, Eskender Bekmambetov, Jay Greenberg, James DeMars, Andrey Rubtsov, Michael Schelle and Lev Zhurbin. The three song cycles on the album are “there…”, set to Russian poems and their English auto-translations by Joseph Brodsky; “Sing, Poetry”, set to Russian poems and their English auto-translations by Vladimir Nabokov; and “Caprice étrange”, set to French poems by Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksandr Pushkin and Fyodor Tyutchev. The common point of the three song cycles is that they are based upon poetry that reflects its authors’ active linguistic integration into Western culture. Album structure “there…” (2006) “there…” is a setting of five poems originally written by Joseph Brodsky in Russian and subsequently translated into English by the author: “Пятая годовщина” / “The Fifth anniversary” (extract), “Английские каменные деревни” / “Stone Villages”, “То не Муза воды набирает в рот” / “Folk Tune” (extract), “Колыбельная” / “Lullaby” (extract) and “Новый Жюль Верн” / “The New Jules Verne” (Part IX). The English and Russian versions of each poem are set to music by Eskender Bekmambetov. In the case of the first four poems, the Russian and English texts are interspersed to form a single song. In the case of “Новый Жюль Верн” / “The New Jules Verne”, the Russian and English versions are sequential: the character of Blanche Delarue first reads letters addressed to her in Russian, then (supposedly in a state of inebriation ten years later) in English. “there…” was premiered at the Pavel Slobodkin Concert Hall in Moscow 14 June 2007.