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Bridge-building through music on the Boston-St. Petersburg shuttle

By Hope Green

	Five student composers from St. Petersburg, Russia, performed for SFA Professor John Daverio's freshman music students on October 19. Standing (left to right) are Ludmilla Leibman, an SFA assistant professor of music theory, Katherine Blinova, Svetlana Nesterova, Daverio, and Maria Petrenko. Seated (left to right) are Anton Tanonov, Leonid Iogansen (SFA'03), and Nikolay Mazhara. Iogansen, an immigrant from St. Petersburg, is studying violin and composition at SFA. Photo by Fred Sway

Music was the common language for a group of student composers from Boston and St. Petersburg, Russia, when they met last week at the School for the Arts to share ideas on their work in progress.

The students, along with a group of professional Russian usicians and scholars, were visiting SFA for eight days of concerts, lectures, and informal discussions as part of the Educational Bridge Project, a rapidly growing cultural exchange program.

The young Russian composers also performed some of their finished pieces for freshmen in a concert music class taught by John Daverio, a professor and chairman of the school's music history department.

In addition, this year's events featured two lectures on 20th-century Russian opera theater by Mikhail Bialik, one of St. Petersburg's oldest and most respected musicologists, and a lecture by composer and pianist Alexander Radvilovich.

Anna Konivets, a curator at the Hermitage Museum, gave a slide presentation on the Hermitage's Winter Palace to visual arts students. Konivets has helped to arrange a solo appearance with the St. Petersburg Camerata next May by Michael Zaretsky, an SFA adjunct associate professor of viola.

Ludmilla Leibman (SFA'99), an SFA assistant professor of music theory, has coordinated trips by American and Russian composers and musicologists to one another's cities for the past four years. But this was the first time student composers participated.

"Having young people on the program has always been our goal," she says.
Leibman, a Russian native who studied and later taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory before immigrating to the United States, is excited about the growth of the Educational Bridge Project since its inception four years ago. The program now receives annual grants from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, a private philanthropy based in New York City that aims to improve relations between the United States and countries of eastern and central Europe.

The financial support covers lodging and travel costs.
"On every trip a new tie is made," Leibman says. "There is something developing every time we go to St. Petersburg or the Russians come here."
In October 1998, for instance, the popular Russian composer Vladislav Uspensky visited BU, and in November of 1999, BU's contemporary music ensemble, ALEA III, performed at the Sound Ways International New Music Festival in St. Petersburg. This past summer, two Russian teenagers attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute in Lenox, Mass.
Other institutions are getting into the act, too: last May, participants from Brandeis and Harvard joined SFA Professor Emeritus Roman Totenberg, Leibman, and other BU musicians on a trip to St. Petersburg. And as part of their itinerary last week, the St. Petersburg composers made appearances at several Boston-area colleges and conservatories.

"It's just amazing how many people are willing to be in on this project," Leibman says. "No one gets a salary for this. We all have a common desire to build a bridge, to help each other understand these two very rich but very different cultures.

"The two countries are so far apart geographically, historically, and language-wise," she adds. "But we have to come together, especially in times like these."

26 October 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations