Muzycy CD 1:
Angelika Niescier- alto saxophone
Shannon Barnett - trombone
Axel Porath - viola
Nathan Bontrager - cello
Simon Nabatov - piano, composition
Stefan Schönegg - bass
Dominik Mahnig - drums

Muzycy CD 2:
Leonhard Huhn - alto saxophone, clarinet
Udo Moll - trumpet, live electronics
Axel Porath - viola
Nathan Bontrager - cello
Simon Nabatov - piano, composition
Roger Kintopf - bass
Dominik Mahnig - drums

Recorded November 5 2022 in LOFT Cologne, Germany
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Stefan Deistler

Simon Nabatov has undertaken one of the most unusual projects in contemporary music, an intense scrutiny and setting to music of modernist Russian literature, much of it taken from the years of Stalinist censorship, repression and imprisonment. For 25 years, beginning with Josef Brodsky’s Nature Morte, he has set text in partially improvised settings, including excerpts from Isaac Babel’s grim Red Cavalry and poems by Daniil Kharms and the Gileya group. Along with that largely poetic enterprise, Nabatov has had a distinct relationship with the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, beginning with a purely instrumental account of The Master and Margarita, one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. It’s joined now by similarly instrumental versions of Bulgakov’s earlier, shorter satires of the 1920s, The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog. It’s as if Nabatov is turning the Bulgakov novels into a different order of text, a musical code that liberates, reenacting the novels in a radically different form.
The Master and Margarita is a metaphysical drama in which Satan, terrifying though he is, seems more sensible and likable than the state minions of 1920s Moscow. Here the various orderings of the world – the metaphysical, the diabolical, the administrative, the insidious – can only be neutralized by love and escaped by death. In the novellas, the enemies are the incompetence of the bureaucracy, the venality of an exalted lumpen proletariat and the compound arrogance of science and the state, both actively liberating themselves from the limits of the world as it is.
The scientists are Dr. Frankenstein’s spiritual sons. In The Fatal Eggs, Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov discovers a ray that causes rapid cellular multiplication. Inadvertently focused on snakes and crocodiles, the ray creates monsters. In Heart of a Dog, Professor Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky operates on a dog, imagining he will create a.......
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