Mozart's Requiem and its performance by K. Pigrov

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to trace in K. Pigrov's performance interpretation of two pieces from W. Mozart's Requiem the signs of the performer’s worldview, which enriched the listening experience by correlating the Church-Orthodox worldview with the deistic-Catholic image of the world formed by the text of Mozart's immortal work. The methodological basis is the intonational approach of B. Asafiev’s school in Ukraine, comparative and hermeneutic prolongations of intonation in the works of D. Androsova, T. Verkina, O. Kozarenko, I. Kotliarevskyi, I. Liashenko, Liu Binjsan, O. Markova, O. Muravska, O. Sokolova, H. Shpak, among others, with the use of scientific research methods: art historical and analytical, descriptive-historical, cultural-regionalist, religious studies, and others. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time in Ukrainian musicology the analysis of the famous work of W. Mozart, using the example of No. 6 and 7 from Mozart’s Requiem, is carried out in view of the interpretation of these fragments by different performers, highlighting the sample of their performance by K. Pigrov, based on the foundations of the Odesa choral school as a church-Orthodox school by genesis, not alien to theatrical and secular sections of interpretation. In addition, for the first time, the specifics of the means by which the effect of Pigrov's interpretation is achieved by timbral-tempo and other sound indicators are highlighted. Conclusions. The multi-stage work of W. Mozart, and after his retirement those who deciphered and completed the text of Requiem, seems to have left an impression on the history of performance, including in the 20th and 21st centuries, which give very different versions of the sound, considering the church origin and at the same time the secularisation of the Latin Requiem In the performance under the baton of K. Pigrov, there was a version that allowed a somewhat "compressed" presentation of the whole for Nos. 6-7, where the images expressed in Nos. 1-7 (the formidable Power of God) and Nos. 8-12 (the height of God’s Mercy) were "collapsed". In the performance of the choir under the direction of K. Pigrov, the tempos are significantly slowed down (especially in No. 7), giving a visual fluidity to the changes in those musical Faces of God, relying on the tempo-articulation "displacement" of the themes and the amplification of sounds by low basses and "scaling" by slowing down the tempo at № 7. This is how an independent poem-type work was born from the named sections of W. Mozart's Requiem.