Gregory Korchmar and Tatyana Apraksina, St. Petersburg, 2010

Composer Gregory Korchmar (1947-2025) wrote his cantata If I were known as a violin bow in St. Petersburg, Russia, between August 2012 and February 2013. Scored for soprano, violin and cello, the eight-movement work premiered at the Petersburg Musical Spring festival in 2019. The cantata sets ten poems by a fellow St. Petersburg native, the artist and writer Tatyana Apraksina, whose texts offer meditations on the metaphysics of music and musical performance. The work is deeply informed by both artists’ resonance with St. Petersburg’s musical traditions and their shared spiritual and cultural affinities.

A distinguished composer, pianist, and harpsichordist, Korchmar was a cornerstone of St. Petersburg’s musical life. A student of Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975), he later taught composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. From 2006, he chaired the St. Petersburg Composers’ Union, succeeding the prominent composer Andrei Petrov (1930–2006). For many years, Korchmar was the primary organizer of the annual St. Petersburg Musical Spring festival of contemporary classical music. His prolific output includes four symphonies, as well as numerous operas, ballets, cantatas, oratorios, and choral works. His contributions were recognized with the title of Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (1996), the St. Petersburg Prize (2003), and the Pushkin Medal for his role in preserving and advancing Russia’s national cultural traditions.

Tatyana Apraksina’s exploration of the spirit and specifics of classical performance was significantly furthered by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which began supporting her work in 1984 under the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903–1988), a key partner of Shostakovich. Major musical and scholarly centers worldwide have since hosted her exhibitions and lectures on creativity and cultural history—ongoing themes in her poetry and essays. Her thought has been shaped by collaborating with original members of the Borodin Quartet — Shostakovich’s ensemble of choice — including cellist Valentin Berlinsky (1925–2008). Another central muse for her work is the noted St. Petersburg violinist Mikhail Gantvarg, founder of the Soloists of Leningrad. Her memorial portraits of Shostakovich and his favorite pupil, Boris Tishchenko (1939–2010), are held in the permanent collection of the St. Petersburg Composers’ Union.

The “voices” and “hands” of these “friends” interweave within the cantata, as does the “frankincense of canon” found in Western and Eastern musical rites. The opening movement sets Apraksina’s restatement of a Pythagorean musical cosmology, while the central movement offers a pentatonically inflected evocation of the legendary meeting between the sages Confucius and Lao Tse. This setting, based on a 1999 poem dedicated to the sinologist Evgeny Torchinov (1956–2003), reflects Apraksina’s studies under him at St. Petersburg’s Institute of Oriental Studies. The closing movement, “To the Violinist’s Hand,” follows a “whirlwind ascent” of sound, where the musical anagrams of Bach and Shostakovich fuse in a culminating sonic “communion.” Interstitial slow and waltz movements echo the late-period Shostakovich, moving through moods of pastoral lyricism (“I discovered my violin…,” “A mountain cello…”), existential starkness (“The measurement for my love’s weight…”) and rhapsodic “transmutation” through creative immersion in the substance of musical craft (“My friends are notes…,” “Fetish”).

The cantata’s texts, written just before and during the early stages of Apraksina’s California sojourn, seek to bridge two worlds. They reflect on her St. Petersburg experience of “music culled from altars” of “distinguished stage boards,” while using the rugged “continental stage” of the coast to uncover further insights. Contemplating “wave bows” and the “cello range” of mountains, she gathers new “information” to deliver back to the Old World’s cultural “bureau.” In response, Korchmar provides music steeped in St. Petersburg’s heritage and the transcendent vitality of “notes and numbers.” Measuring “heaven’s interval” together with Apraksina, Korchmar’s work amplifies her poetry’s sense of how “vibration” can reconcile places, times, and modes of thought and being.

James Manteith — translator of Apraksina’s poem sequence California Psalms (Radiolarian, 2013 and 2024) and other works — has prepared an English-language singable rendering of the soprano part for Korchmar’s If I were known as a violin bow cantata. To inquire about recordings, performance status or the availability of the Russian and English versions, please contact apraksinblues@gmail.com.