Sergey Berinsky (1946-1998) was fated to live not a very long, but a very
intensive life. His premature death in March, 1998 came when he was in
the prime of his force and talent, breaking off his planes, orphaning
his children, friends and pupils...
Sergey Samuilovich Berinsky was born in 1946 in the little Moldavian town
of Novye Kaushany. His childhood and youth are connected with Donetsk
(the Ukraine), where he graduated from a music school and college as
violinist. There was a cultivated interest for literature in his family,
there sounded various folk music - Jewish, Rumanian, Moldavian, Ukrainian.
This atmosphere also inspired the composer's elder brother, the well-known
poet and translator Lev Berinsky, who in his turn influenced the literary
tastes of his younger brother. In 1970 Sergey entered the Gnessin State
Music Pedagogique Institute, A.G.Tchugaev's class of composition.
Tchugaev exerted deep influence on the development of his personality
as a musician and a person. All his life Sergey kept grateful memory of
his teacher.
After graduating from the Institute Berinsky stays in Moscow, working all
the more actively as a composer. At the same time his rich, active nature
is looking for some new forms of realization. His talent of human
contact together with temperament and innate "instinct of truth" draw
him to some "non-formal" pedagogic and enlightening projects and to
creation of a kind of laboratory of composition creativity. Sergey
organized a music club, that was to become, according to his own words, a
proving ground for music of all trends." He runs a seminar for young
composers in the House of creative work "Ivanovo", edits the column
devoted to interviews with his colleagues in the journal "Music Academy".
These activities that went on outside of formal pedagogical
institutes and were full of real creative energy (it helped Berinsky to
gain a lot of devoted pupils and followers), deserve all the more
attention as they took place in the hard years of post-perestroika,
when many of Sergey's colleagues left the country, moving to the
prosperous West. During all those years Sergey did not stop his own
work as a composer...
Sergey Berinsky was convinced that creativity had a unique and individual
nature. That's why he was alien to group manifests and slogans of the day.
At the same time his own creative work was born to no small degree by
the time - the atmosphere of Russian culture of last the decades of the
century. Berinsky was spiritually close to his elder contemporaries -
A.Schnittke and S.Gubaidulina, who had already passed the period of
avant-garde experiments. He managed to embody in his creative work features
of the 1970s generation - such as taste for synthesis of musical
language, bent for self-reflexion, inclination for some super-arduous
tasks. Berinsky's diversity, which can be seen both in his choice of poetic
texts and in his musical style (from everyday features - to high pathetics,
from baroque rhetoric and synagogue chants - to jazz), is of romantic
nature. It is not accidental that it was G.Mahler who was so close to
him - with his breadth of sources, translated into this confessional
speech of his. Berinsky himself was a kind of romantic and idealist,
who tragically felt that his time came "out of joint",
and at the same time yearned for Harmony and Love, for merging with nature
and cosmos. Though he believed that the hard way of music of the 20th
century was that of destroying and re-creating beauty, he himself took this
hard way, creating very different, sometimes emotionly polar works.
Berinsky's another predecessor was D.Shostakovich,
they were brought together by their treatment of the
Jewish theme, as well as by their keen social responsiveness.
Hence, so frequent in his creative output were memorial genres and
dedications, that were originated both by personal losses and thoughts
about victims of mass genocide. Later on a religious note became
all the more pressing in his works - he used either the subjects from
the Old Testament (for example, in "David's Psalms" for four cellos) or
musical genres of liturgical tradition (tested for the first time
in "Requiem to the memory of Janusz Korczak", 1979).
In Berinsky's music, there found its response philosophical lyrics
of R.M.Rilke ("Symphony-cantata To Orfeo") and high erotica of ancient
oriental poetry ("Songs of Langour" by Makhtumkuli) and humor of Russian
post-modernists ("Tears of Heraldic Soul" by D.Prigov). In his yearning
for embracing the unbounded he sometimes touched upon some forbidden zones of
emotional naturalism, as in a vocal mono-play "Hysteriada" and accordion
pieces "in a bad style". And there always sounded his author's voice,
perfectly recognizable in verses in various languages, in forms of
a symphony, concerto, quartet, sonata...
Berinsky's composing projects often came from live contacts with
performers. He dedicated some of his works, including "Double Portrait",
to his daughters, a violinist and a floutist. Among famous musicians, who
interpreted (and sometimes inspired)
his works, are violinist I.Bochkova, singers L.Mkrtchyan
and I.Kuindzhi, cellists N.Shakhovskaya and V.Tonkha, clarinetists
L.Mikhailov and E.Petrov, accordionist F.Lips are among them. The last
name also deserves mentioning because the composer, who knew the possibilities
of this musician, used the accordion in quite a new way, different from its
usual role of "folk instrument". The accordion for him is both a source
of new sound colours and a metaphor of human breath - a surrealistically
intensified image of the suffering human soul.
Sergey Berinsky's creative legacy is both extensive and polygenre. He
wrote five symphonies (the Fifth one was left uncompleted), concertos for
various ensembles with solists, chamber-instrumental and chamber-vocal
cycles, choral works, music for the theatre and the cinema (including
soundtrack for the film "Ladies' Tailor").
His name is included into the New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians.
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