Nekyia by Dmitri Kourliandski, Dimitris Yalamas, Elena Nemkova
The music of the intimate whisper, choking sounds, spikes, whimpers, groans and four-pianissimo, from which incoherent words, sentences and cautious sounds emerge, fill the whole hour. This vocal score expresses resistance in its existential minimalism.
Gisela Nauck for Deutschlandfunk Kultur (12.12.2017)
Nekyia is Odysseus’ descend in Hades where he speaks to the dead. Each listener becomes Odysseus listening to the voices of Hades – four monologues by the heroes of Ancient Greece mythology: Alexandra, Alcestis, Eurydice and Epicasta.
Dmitri Kourliandski
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Offline version of “Nekyia” was premiered at Voznesensky centre in Moscow, March 13 - May 12, 2019 as an opera-installation combining 4-channel sound and multiscreen video created specially for the project by artist Elena Nemkova.
Tracklist
Credits
Nekyia
online opera*
2016
Dmitri Kourliandski: music
Dimitris Yalamas: text**
Elena Nemkova: video***
Performed by soloists of the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky choir:
1. Alexandra: Ekaterina Andreeva
2. Alcestis: Maria Menshenina
3. Eurydice: Tatiana Perevalova
4. Epicaste: Alina Gorina
Music director: Arina Zvereva
Recorded by: Ruslan Zaipold, Electrotheatre Stanislavsky Studio, Moscow, 2016
Special thanks to: Andrei Voznesensky Foundation and Electrotheatre Stanislavsky
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* online opera: the format provides a possibility of listening to solo arias-monologues as well as duos or trios of any combinations by playing the tracks in parallel on different devices or in different windows. The four monologues can be also listened to as a quartet in one track. Whether you are listening in headphones or with loudspeakers, outdoors or indoors – the surrounding everyday reality mixes up with the sounding monologues and becomes the scenic realization of the opera.
** Translated by Stanislav Lvovsky [1], Steven Saymour [2-4]
*** “Retinal poetries” by Elena Nemkova:
The inner layer of the eyes serve to create some moving images on the retina, much the same as the film in a camera. Light striking the retina initiates a cascade of chemical and electrical events that ultimately trigger nerve impulses. These are sent to various visual centres of the brain through the optic nerve.
The colourful scintillate illusions of these Retinal Poetries are the flows of loss of consciousness, a bath of forced Eden, a brain melancholia; even they are driven by very mechanical stimuli.
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