Mirror. Symphony #3 (in three poems)

"The Mirror" was created in 1997. In the same year it was performed in Volgograd and St.-Petersburg at the initiative of the maestro Edward Serov.

Edvard Serov

22 years later, Andrei Tikhomirov returned to his work and created a new version of it. Then The Mirror was conducted by maestro Mikhail Granovsky in Tomsk at the Edison Denisov Contemporary Music Festival.

Mikhail Granovsky

The symphony has three Parts. Each part has its own name: The Loneliness, The March, The Silence.

The image of Loneliness, to which the first part of the symphony is devoted, is from the point of view of the composer perhaps a tragic but necessary condition for the self-expression of the individual. It also is an inevitable attribute of the creative process. 

But the soul is multifaceted; human aspirations are also diverse. Thus, a person who is not alien to the highest beauty of loneliness may suddenly find himself in a marching column and feel, like everyone else, the delight of abandoning his own "I" in favor of an illusory, but captivating desire for unity with millions - and it doesn’t matter to what's up

But the soul is multifaceted; varied, too, are human aspirations. Thus a person, not alien to flights of the soul and the formal beauty of Loneliness, can find himself unexpectedly in a marching column and feel, just as all the others, the delight of the renunciation of one’s own “I” in favour of an illusionary but captivating striving for unity with millions – and it is not important for which cause.  We remember many examples of this, especially in the twentieth century. The second part of the symphony, The March is devoted to this theme.

The music of this part contains many allusions to the mass "ideological" music of the Soviet communist period, but not only of it. The attentive ear will hear there echoes of Nazi songs, and much more. The whole marching XX century is there.

And this is not a parody, this is an attempt to convey the hypnosis of totalitarianism, in which a person, unfortunately, can feel quite happy.

In the third part, which is called "Silence", a human voice and a poem by the great Russian emigrant poet Ivan Bunin are heard. Before the end, the orchestra stops playing, and a fragment from the 1st part of the recording begins to sound. But now this is only an image reflected in the mirror of memory.