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I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
In our polyphonic performances, we are trying to activate all of our senses simultaneously, without contriving the process. The ultimate goal is the immersive experience where we “disappear.” We begin to perceive only on a subconscious level, in synergy: the music compliments poetry, scents interact with paintings and relevant pieces of films, and, eventually, we climb that imaginary staircase, towards the encounter with the genius.
Upcoming
Event
Our new Resonance season: five concept concerts, five stories with which we’ve been living for a while now.
September 29 — “Father and Daughter, Mother and Son”
Dan Sloutskovski, cello
Leon Livshin, piano.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Sonata in G minor for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord, BWV 1029
Ludwig van Beethoven
7 Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” (Mozart), WoO 46
Johannes Brahms
Sonata No. 2 in F major for Cello and Piano, Op. 99
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Songs for Cello and Piano (arrangement)
It turns out there's a whole family of stories about children trying to see their parents clearly, and parents trying to be forgiven, or understood, before it's too late... Take Rembrandt: he painted one of them, the prodigal son, kneeling, home at last, in the arms of a father who forgives him, though for how long, who knows? Or Bergman's daughter, the wonderful writer Linn Ullmann herself, who wrote a book trying to understand her genius father, the director, as his mind slowly left him. Or Tarkovsky, in his film, who gave us a hero invisible on screen, wrapped up in old grievances and a reckoning with his mother, tormented by guilt, unable to find peace, returning again and again to... the mirror of the past. Sokurov, on the other hand, in his "Mother and Son," gives us something quite opposite: an almost unbelievable tenderness and closeness with a mother, held in the last moments of her life...
Curious, which of these scenarios would we actually choose, in our real lives? Or, failing that, in the one we quietly imagine for ourselves at night?
Or maybe parents and children will trade places, as in our final excerpt, from a wildly moving (!!) animated film by the Dutch director Dudok de Wit, where it's the daughter, waiting by the road, year after year, for a father who does, in the end, come back, whether in imagination or in life...
But don't worry. All of this is just the pepper for the main course, and the main course, naturally, is music 🙏💃: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff, each carrying his own unresolved story with a mother, a father, some idealized by an early death, some difficult, even tormented.
As you can see, looking at the poster, I've been a little mischievous and swapped the prodigal son for... 😱 a daughter (and not a prodigal one at that), and I hope Rembrandt forgives me 🙏 this liberty, which I don't actually allow myself very often. It's just that with some paintings, you don't merely look at them, you quietly start living inside them... I'd suggest you do the same: put anyone you love in there, a daughter or son, a mother or father... Is there any hope for real understanding? Or maybe for forgiveness? For love?
And if all of that isn't enough for you, here's the real treat of the evening: one of our performers, the wonderful cellist Dan Sloutskovski, will become, for a few moments... 😱💃 a character in our own little investigation. If he's willing, he'll share something of his own experience in the mysterious and complicated territory of mother-son relationships... though tell me, who among us has a simple one?
Because, however you look at it, I suppose we're all trying to understand something about ourselves, and about the people close to us. So let's ask together: what is the real price of this love? For the children. And for the parents.?
“Excess of Love and Hate” (Tchaikovsky and His Wife)
Music of Tchaikovsky.
This concert is about Tchaikovsky and his wife, Milyukova. For years, all I knew about her came through his brother’s letters and memoirs, filtered and subjective, which built up a legend of a dim woman who didn’t understand music, didn’t understand Tchaikovsky… none of it. Then I read her own memoirs, and while she’s no intellectual, she is sharp, and there is a real dignity to her. Her story turns out to be far more interesting than the “official legend” and everything that has been written about her.
For most audiences, this will all be new: Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality; his marriage that fell apart in less than a year, but that was never actually dissolved—Milyukova simply refused to grant him a divorce. (Both these facts are still close to taboo in Russian public life and official culture, even now.) The only part of the story some people know is Tchaikovsky’s failed suicide attempt after this marriage.
All of this leaves us with the question: when we love too much, do we end up destroying the other person? And where does our responsibility lie in the face of a love like that?
“The Price of Belonging: Assimilated, But Never Accepted”
Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn, Alfred Schnittke, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin.
Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn were baptized, changed their name, and dedicated their lives to German music. Alfred Schnittke was German and Jewish at once, raised in Soviet Russia, and died a Catholic. Robert and Clara Schumann adored Mendelssohn; Robert once called him a true God of music, yet their private diaries are purely antisemitic. Tonight we consider that contradiction and ask what it says about us.
We finish with Chopin, who never tried to belong anywhere. He left Poland at twenty and never went back, his heart returned to Warsaw after death while the rest of him stayed in French soil. But even so, he was searching for his belonging. It’s well known that he was rather antisemitic, expressing casual contempt for Jewish colleagues in his letters, even though he counted Jewish musicians among his closest friends.
Yet his music emanates different vibrations—divine, untouched by any of this. So… does it matter, in the end, if we know? And what is the price of belonging?
Reflection of the last season
Dear Friends of Resonance Salon,
I congratulate us all on the completion of our fourth season. I wish you a summer of gentle, undemanding beauty: sunsets, sunrises, the bearable lightness of being, and music that asks absolutely nothing of you whatsoever. We all need rest from being too serious about life.
For those of you who feel that five concerts on madness, cruelty, and the dissolution of the self was not quite enough, I have written something below for us to contemplate together.
For the rest, thank you deeply and sincerely for spending four seasons with us. For your curiosity, your patience, and for simply being alive and choosing to spend some of that aliveness with us.
Our audience is growing both inwards and outwards. Nearly every concert this season was fully sold out, which is perhaps a sign that people are hungry for something beyond the traditional concert format. Not that there is anything wrong with the traditional format. I still love it dearly. I just also love it when there are no artificial boundaries and, in a single evening, we can meet people we would never expect to find in the same room: Piaf and Bergman, Wolf and his own reincarnation on stage…
Have a great and joyful summer.
Artistically yours,
Leon
The Season Reflection
If you look at our entire season as one long novel, you get the feeling that at first all of this looked like a cultural game played by elite people with good taste and ended up as almost a collective session of existential therapy :))
And what makes it especially suspicious is that everything began absolutely innocently. So what: Boundless B! Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Bergman, Bruegel, Bresson. European salon spirit. Beautiful people, beautiful conversations, beautiful wine.
And then suddenly it turns out that through Bergman's extraordinary film Saraband, the heroine is finally trying to sort things out with her father and cello teacher after her mother's death, and our cellist Sergey Antonov unexpectedly, for all of us, goes through absolutely the same story 😱😱😱 and starts talking about his own mother after his father's death, and the audience is no longer entirely sure: did they come to a chamber music evening or did they accidentally stumble into an exhibitionistic form of confession? And thank you Sergey for those minutes. Because that was the exact moment when music first stopped being just repertoire and became a door, or a cover, for human vulnerability…
Then came the Theatre of Cruelty. And here you wanted precisely an electric shock. Antonin Artaud, Bartók, Balinese theater dances, nerve, the feeling that art must not calm a person but wake them up, preferably at three in the morning of one's inner existence. That was a concert especially resonant, I think, for people who have at least kept their souls young. Where you are not afraid that modernity is flaying the skin off a person and then Bach carefully tries to put the nervous system back together.
Then there was Progress in Art, and this was perhaps the most conciliatory project of the season. Because the very idea of discussing "progress in art" today sounds almost absurd. After all, progress is supposedly happening almost automatically: phones get thinner, algorithms get smarter, people sleep worse, etc. But through the Black Square, through Arnold Schoenberg and through Johannes Brahms, there suddenly emerged an almost unanimous conclusion: it seems there is no progress in art whatsoever 😱😱😱. At any rate, our salon audience didn't seem to find much enthusiasm for the opposing view. Yes, technique develops, but the human soul has possibly been going in circles for several thousand years already.
And then Sincerity in Art / Art of Sincerity happened. And this concert, to my astonishment, provoked the most arguments and bewilderment. Because the moment the question arises, “but what actually is sincerity?”, the ground starts to slip from under your feet. Interestingly, it was precisely the "sincere" concert that turned out to be almost painful for me personally. Serves me right. You shouldn't go poking into people's souls with a flashlight and philosophical categories. Because what had seemed absolutely obvious, this here is sincere 🙏 and that there is fake 😂, suddenly stopped being obvious at all. It seems this is an unpleasant but apparently necessary discovery: sincerity cannot be verified. It has no certificate of authenticity. Sometimes a mask is more honest than a confession. And sometimes a person plays their role so sincerely that they no longer know themselves where the performance ends and life begins.
And finally the last concert. Where Do We Go When We Go Mad? Here, I think, we moved furthest away from music toward something already almost metaphysical. Through Schumann, Wolf, Ingmar Bergman, and of course Piaf, the theme became not intellectual, not psychological, but almost lived: how do we cope with difficulty, taking genius as our example? It suddenly became existential rather than psychiatric. And it was no longer about "mad geniuses." It was about something far stranger: can art and love lead us toward our true "self"? Or on the contrary, toward liberation from this endless, exhausting "self"?
And here arises, perhaps, the central paradox of the season. All the programs were what you might call "intellectual" and thank you to the audience for your patience 🙏🙏 : philosophy, cinema, literature, art history, poetry, and so on. References upon references; after all, ours is an elite salon and we assume people already know a ton of things. But the result turned out to be almost anti- or supra-intellectual. Because it seems our season led not to clarity but to mystery. Not to answers but to a condition: not to explain a person definitively, but to make their existence a little more bearable and at the same time a little more beautiful. ❤️💃🏿
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Program Changes and Cancellations
Programs and artists are subject to change. If an event presented by NY Resonance is cancelled or postponed, we will announce the change—if time permits—by email, phone, a letter sent to your home, and on www.nyresonance.com.
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