The Grand Philharmonic Hall will host St. Petersburg premiere of Anton Batagov’s vocal cycle “16+”, based on poems by women - from Enheduanna to Vera Polozkova

The vocal cycle “16+” by one of the most famous Russian composers Anton Batagov, based on poems by women, will be held at the St. Petersburg Grand Philharmonic Hall on February 20. The world premiere of the cycle will take place a few days before at Zaryadye Hall in Moscow. The oldest text used in the cycle dates from the XXIII century BC and belongs to the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, the most modern one – to Vera Polozkova. The St. Petersburg premiere of the cycle will be performed by soprano Nadezhda Kucher and Anton Batagov.

“I learned some time ago that the first poet whose name was preserved in history had been a woman. She lived in the XXIII century BC in the Sumerian city-state of Ur. Her name was Enheduanna. She was a priestess of goddess Enanna and god Nanna. She composed hymns and prayers and sang them. They survived and were translated into modern languages. These texts are not just brilliant poetry. They contain the quintessence of what Buddha, then Christ, would be telling people in two millennia”, says Anton Batagov, “and I wanted to write a vocal cycle on poems, the authors of which are women only. I began to explore this absolutely amazing layer of literature. I read a total of several thousand texts created at different times: verses, hymns, prayers, poetic descriptions of visions and revelations. I’ve chosen only sixteen poems for my cycle. Any choice always implies denial of something. I decided to limit myself to two languages ​​- English and Russian. I had to leave “behind the scenes” a huge number of masterpieces in all other languages ​​of the world. My choice is devoid of any historical and geographical ordering. It was important for me that all these texts form into a one-piece “journey”.

The cycle consists of nine texts in English, seven in Russian. Of the nine English ones, three were written by English authors of the XVI, XVII and XIX centuries (Anne Askew, Anne Wharton, Emily Bronte), and the other three – by the XIX–XXI century Americans (Emily Dickinson, Sarah Tisdale, Maya Engelow), and three were translated into English from Sumerian (Enheduanna, XXIII century BC), Middle Dutch (Hadewijch, XIII century) and Hindi (Mirabay, XVI century). The Russian poetry texts of the XIX-XXI century poets: Yevdokiya Nagrodskaya, Zinaida Gippius, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Iskrenko, Vera Polozkova.

One of the texts is in Church Slavonic: a translation from the Greek Saint of Constantinople Cassia (IX c.), whose texts are included in the canon of the Russian Orthodox Church. 

“All sixteen authors are unique personalities. Reading their biographies in itself makes a tremendous impression”, says Anton Batagov, and adds that “compositions written in different centuries and millennia say the same thing: love that woman experiences deeply and uncompromisingly; love, where God and the beloved are one and the same”.

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