The Baku Society for Contemporary Music and the Museum Center will host a lecture by composer, musicologist, and cultural theorist Elmir Mirzoev titled “Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces and the Archetypal Beginning of Russian Music,” which will take place on April 19 at 16:00 in the Museum Center (assembly hall, 3rd floor).
According to Aze.Media, Les Noces is one of Stravinsky’s most fascinating works, concluding his so-called “Russian period.” The score was dedicated to Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, with whom the composer had a long-standing creative friendship. In “Chronicles of My Life,” Stravinsky describes Les Noces as a ballet, though the choreographic action is entirely subordinate to the symbolic nature of the characters, representing the Groom, Bride, Groom’s Mother, and Best Man. The premiere of Les Noces took place on June 13, 1923, at the Théâtre Gaîté-Lyrique in Paris.
In his lecture, Elmir Mirzoev will discuss the works of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Sergei Prokofiev, through the lens of Les Noces. He will also talk about poets such as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Nikolay Gumilev, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexander Blok, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The lecturer will focus on the literary group “Scythians,” whose aesthetic thinking expressed a common trend of the Silver Age, drawing some parallels in visual arts and the art of dance.
Elmir Mirzoev graduated from the Uzeyir Hajibeyli Baku Music Academy (class of Professor Faraj Karayev) specializing in composition. As a student, he actively participated in international programs, master classes, seminars, and courses. He taught at the Uzeyir Hajibeyli Baku Music Academy (1998-2002) and the Cologne Conservatory (2007), and also conducted lectures in countries such as Georgia, the Czech Republic, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. He was the artistic director of the ensemble SoNoR, the first group of contemporary music in the post-Soviet era, founded in 1995.
