Emma-Marie Kabanova is a classically-trained violinist who has been living in Russia for the last decade. She is a founding member of Globus Music, an ensemble that features musicians from the Bolshoi Theatre and dancers from the Kremlin Ballet. Her music can be heard via her Soundcloud page and a number of her live performances can be found on her YouTube channel. Last week she spoke to me from Moscow via Skype.
Alistair Pitts: Hi Emma, thanks for taking the time to speak to me. So, you’ve been living in Russia for about a decade now, but I understand that you grew up in Dorset in the UK?
Emma-Marie Kabanova: Yes, I lived in Dorset until I went to university when I was 19.
AP: Am I right in saying that there’s also a Danish connection?
EMK: Yeah, my mum is Danish. We’d go to Denmark quite a lot in the summer to see relatives and relatives would come to us, so there was a sort of toing and froing.
AP: Was Russia particularly on your radar when you were growing up?
EMK: Not really! My mum had a friend who had a Russian scarf, so I always associated Russia with that scarf… But it didn’t really come on my radar until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early ‘90s, when I was around 8 or 9.
AP: I don’t really remember that at all myself, but I do vaguely remember the Yeltsin years and it constantly seemed like the Russian economy was crashing.
EMK: Well, exactly. It always seemed to be on the news that there were more terrible things happening in Russia and it just seemed to me like a place that you really wouldn’t want to go to.
AP: So initially there weren’t exactly positive associations, but things have obviously changed quite a bit for you. When did you first go to Russia and how did that come about?
EMK: I first went there for a week in 2006. I had studied at Goldsmiths, which has a centre for Russian music. Being a musician, you can’t really ignore Russia’s input! I had started to become more aware of the cultural history of Russia as a teenager and it was fascinating, learning about Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes and reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky… So I’d sort of connected with Tsarist Russia and then when I was at Goldsmiths the centre of Russian music was very active at that time and I really got sucked into it and ended up studying with Professor Alexander Ivashkin, who was actually a cellist. My degree was more theoretical than practical so I spent a lot of hours discussing Soviet music and Russian music in general in his office. He really showed me another side of Russia and brought it all to life. There were constantly musicians coming from Russia and everyone who came had this amazing standard of playing that I could only aspire to. When I was doing my master’s, we were invited on an exchange programme to the conservatory and I was part of the team organising that. Unfortunately, on their side some paperwork, as it often does in Russia, got mislaid and unfortunately the visit didn’t happen, which was very sad. So, my mum knew that I was feeling quite upset about not being able to go to Russia, and, being a good mum, she picked up a leaflet from a Christian resources event. There was this organisation called Love Russia that was asking for volunteers to come and do either music therapy or painting or other types of activities with children at an orphanage. They had all of these nice, bright pictures and it looked like a lot of fun so I decided that that’s what I’d do. So I went to the Ryazan region for a week and it was amazing. It was everything that it looked like in the pictures. It was fun and heart-warming and we felt that we had actually made a difference. It really made me think hard about my future.
AP: You described Professor Ivashkin as showing you another side of Russia, could you develop that a bit further? What was it about Russia that he showed you that you hadn’t previously been aware of?
EMK: He was an incredibly warm person and incredibly vibrant. He had been a student of Rostropovich. His way of teaching wasn’t really about technique and it wasn’t really about playing rhythmically and with the right dynamics etc. but he would tell stories and he would get side-tracked and would say, *puts on a Russian accent* “When I was in Russia…” and you would think, ‘here comes another great story!’ He had been there in the Soviet times and was quite active in promoting, for example, the music of Alfred Schnittke, another Soviet composer. And there were stories from his youth and the things they got up to which made me realise that Russians were just like anybody else! They weren’t either those sad people that I saw in my childhood in the newspapers, nor were they these lofty people like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, they were just quite cool, fun people, really! There was one story I heard about Alexander Ivashkin. In his dormitory when he was studying at the conservatory, he woke up one morning to write poetry all over the walls so that when people came down they would read all these poems. There was this delightful, subversive, incredibly cultural side.
AP: It’s a huge generalisation, obviously, but that intensity, but in a creative way, is certainly a pattern I have noticed about Russians.
EMK: For people of that generation, they weren’t as free as Russians are now. For them, freedom existed in their minds. So there was this broad-minded intellectualism, if you can say that? I’ve met a lot of people in Russia who are similar to that. And I think that’s something that’s unique to Russia. This sort of depth of feeling, tempered with the knowledge that everything’s going to hell in a handcart! There’s this will to live beautifully and make the best of it. So that’s the side that was new to me back then.
AP: In 2007, you moved to Russia properly, how did that come about?
EMK: Well, I graduated from my master’s with this pretty unappliable specialisation, ‘Soviet Music’.
AP: In other words super-interesting but it doesn’t necessarily lead to a job?
EMK: It doesn’t lead to anything! And so towards the end of my master’s I had realised that I wasn’t really preparing myself for anything in particular. I had thought about doing music therapy, and going to Russia that summer was a sort of test of ‘is it for me’. I then shadowed a music therapist in my home town and dabbled a lot in that but I wasn’t convinced that it was my kind of thing. I kept thinking that I’d just like to play to people, really. So I was thinking and praying and wracking my brains and scouring advertisements and then one day I saw an advertisement for a job in Siberia. They said they were looking for someone to do creative activities with children in orphanages. It could be art, it could be music, it could be dance, whatever. And I thought, ‘that’s for me’, so that’s how I ended up there.
AP: Whereabouts in Siberia was that? It’s, famously, a very big place!
EMK: Novosibirsk.
AP: And how long were you there for?
EMK: Only for a year.
AP: How would you describe it as a place?
EMK: Well, it’s a Communist city, in that Stalin had very grand ideas about making it the centre of Siberian culture so it boasts the world’s largest opera house…
AP: Oh wow, I did not know that!
EMK: Yes, it’s as tall as it is deep so it’s sort of the Ceausescu palace of opera! It also has a very good conservatory and when I lived there, a very good violin professor was teaching and I was lucky enough to have some lessons. So if you like music and ballet, Novosibirsk is a reasonable place to be! If you like ice hockey, there’s quite a splendid ice hockey team there as well. Also, the River Ob runs through the city and it’s beautiful on the banks, especially in springtime, with the birch trees and when everything comes alive. Novosibirsk was sort of a showcase city so the architecture along the main street is all Stalin baroque, a bit like on Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow so it’s quite grand and austere! It’s a bit intimidating, actually. It’s built on a grand scale and it’s absolutely not a cosy city.
AP: So, it doesn’t really meet Danish hygge standards?
EMK: Совсем нет! [Not at all!]
AP: Fair enough! So, you were there for a year, and then I understand you moved on to Moscow. How did that come about?
EMK: I moved to Moscow because the job that I assumed that I’d be doing in Novosibirsk sort of fell through. I managed to play for terminally ill children but it wasn’t very regular and when I tried to visit orphanages it usually ended up with me being told that I could play in the corridor for five minutes…
AP: That sounds pretty demoralising.
EMK: It was rather! And I just felt that I’d be better off in another place where I could be a bit more useful. So I joined back up with the Love Russia team and started to teach music appreciation in a centre for young offenders on the outskirts of Moscow. So that was a bit more like what I had envisaged myself doing.
AP: How did you find that they [the young offenders] responded to what you were doing?
EMK: It varied. There were older boys groups, and younger boys groups and girls. There were three classes and often the older boys were bigger than me and not in the centre for the first time and already quite… uh, I don’t know if you know much about Russian criminal culture…?
AP: Not a huge amount, if I’m honest!
EMK: Yeah, I don’t know that much either, but there is a way of conducting yourself, and a worldview and there’s also a music that they listen to.
AP: Oh right?
EMK: Yeah… So they would often ask me to play these songs that I didn’t know at all and I would say to them, ‘why would I know this? I’m not only, you know, a foreigner but I’m not a criminal either! So sometimes that would be a point that we could joke about and I’d make them teach me. So they’d sing it and I’d play it back to them and that would be a good starting point. Basically, I’d go in there and play the fool really; I’d ask them what music they liked and I wouldn’t have a clue what it was and for them that would be hilarious and that would sort of break the ice.
AP: I suppose the advantage of something like music, especially where you have the technique to pick things up quickly, is that it can be a meeting place for people.
EMK: Yes, very much so!
AP: How would you describe the style of music that they were into for people who hadn’t heard that sort of thing before? Is there any sort of comparison that you could make?
EMK: It’s sort of a combination of gypsy airs, and there’s acoustic guitars with lots of up-strumming. There’s quite scratchy vocals and the themes are always about life in its hardness and difficult experiences, and how love is never sweet and often they sing about prison and these sorts of things. It’s quite distinctive. There’s actually a radio station called Radio Chanson dedicated to this kind of music, because it’s not just criminals, soldiers tend to love it too… most people, actually, have a soft spot somewhere in their heart for it.
AP: I was going to say, actually, that a feature of my Moscow life, I guess, was quite regularly seeing, just on corners outside of metro stations and in district centres in Moscow, you’d have groups of guys, usually pretty thick-set and in their combat gear playing very beaten-up-looking guitars and maybe with a synth keyboard as well…I wondered whether it was that sort of thing.
EMK: Yes, it is, it’s exactly that sort of thing. It’s called chanson in Russian.
AP: Oh yes, that does sound very familiar but of course the word ‘chanson’ has very French associations, which is possibly slightly misleading!
EMK: Yes, to the English mind, and you think *affects very prim accent*, ‘Oh, how charming!’
AP: It makes me think about someone like Edith Piaf, but then in terms of subject matter, maybe that’s not so off the mark…
EMK: In England we had troubadour songs many years ago, so it’s from that sort of tradition, singing about life in all of its colourfulness.
AP: …And messiness as well, it sounds like!
EMK: Exactly!
AP: If you’ll forgive me for jumping forward in time a bit here to the present day, is there such a thing as a typical week for you as a freelance violinist in Moscow?
EMK: Not really. Freelance is sort of a bit of a stretch, in terms of how a freelance musician works in the UK, really. There, you might have an agency or a ‘fixer’ who gets you gigs. This model, as I understand it, really doesn’t work in Russia as orchestras are such big institutions. It’s sort of like a factory; you finish university and you join an orchestra, and if you’re ill, they get someone from in house to stand in for you so in that sense it’s really not what the typical British understanding of what a freelance musician is. For me, it’s more that I have a gig here and a gig there and somebody might phone me and say that there’s something happening and that they need a violinist, ‘what’s your price?’ that kind of thing. But it can be quite sporadic.
AP: So is there a more typical kind of gig that you would do, or is it just very varied?
EMK: The more typical gig that I have would be with my ensemble. So we organise them ourselves, we contact venues and we create our own programme. We rehearse in our own time and… on the one hand, that can be a bit of a headache… It’s a logistical nightmare sometimes, but on the other hand it gives great freedom!
AP: Just as an example, you mentioned when we were arranging the time for this conversation that you had a concert coming up on Saturday [18th February]. Where was that, and what were you playing?
EMK: That was quite an interesting event because, well, you might remember on Christmas Day there was the plane crash that killed the Alexandrov Ensemble? Well, I work with singers from the Bolshoi and two of our singers were quite well-acquainted with someone who was killed, so this concert was organised in memorial of those that were killed in the accident. It was a rather extended concert, involving poetry and they have this panakhid, mourning for the dead, so that comes either 40 days after the funeral or the death and so events are organised to commemorate this. We performed some music by Purcell, as that’s our thing, then Dvorak’s Rusalka, which was beautifully sung by one of our sopranos and then I performed a bit of Vivaldi’s Winter and we ended with O, Holy Night because they had passed away on Christmas Day.
AP: It sounds like an incredibly moving event to have been a part of.
EMK: Yes, it was. Strangely enough, and I wouldn’t say it was exactly typical, but I have been asked to do events like that quite a lot. I once played for very elderly survivors of the Holocaust, which was an incredibly overwhelming experience. You stand and look at them and think to yourself, ‘I’m supposed to be playing, how dare I?’ But then you have to take a deep breath and say to yourself, ‘that’s why it’s important to play because culture and beauty is victorious in such situations’. So I’m always happy to play for such occasions even though they can be very sad.
AP: I hope you don’t mind if I change tack a bit, but do you have a favourite Russian composer? Or alternatively one whose music you most enjoy playing?
EMK: It’s so hard to choose, but I do have a real soft spot for Schnittke.
AP: Actually, I was meaning to ask you some more about Schnittke, as it’s not a name I’m familiar with. How would you describe his music?
EMK: Polystylistic! That’s his ‘thing’, as it were. For example, his most well-known work is the Concerto Grosso No.1 and at certain points… well, the Concerto Grosso is a baroque form and at certain points you think, ‘ah, this is baroque music’, but then it starts to sound a bit weird and the harmonies become rather odd and suddenly it turns into a tango, then it changes again to the sort of sounds you might associate with contemporary improvisation. It’s a little bit of everything, really.
AP: That sounds quite playful – almost as if he enjoyed setting up a certain set of expectations and then confounding them…
EMK: Yes, it’s absolutely music with humour, but Schnittke himself was a very deep person. It’s also music that has a lot of philosophy behind it. He was into numerology and the meaning of notes, certain harmonies had a mystical meaning or connotation for him. So you can take it at surface value as just this crazy, fun music or you can take it deeper and see a little bit into what he might have been intending with the music.
AP: That sounds fascinating, I will definitely have to check it out. Before we finish, I wanted to ask you about your Globus Music project. Am I right in saying that that started in 2014 and the project won the Points of Light Award from the UK Prime Minister’s office this year?
EMK: That’s right.
AP: Could you tell me a bit about how that started and what the project involves?
EMK: So, 2014 was the year of British culture in Russia and Russian culture in Britain. A fact that probably passed most people by! The Globus project started because the director of a language school wanted to do something to promote the school. He wanted to have some cultural event, maybe art, maybe music, maybe drama; he wasn’t quite sure. And I said that I could definitely do a concert so I played The Lark Ascending, Tchaikovsky’s Melancholy Serenade, a bit of Glazunov, some Walton, and Delius in a small community centre. It was quite a romantic programme as we did it around Valentine’s Day. It was quite successful for what it was. People seemed to enjoy it and the wife of this school director said, ‘let’s do another one for Easter’, so we did an Easter concert, and then we started talking about the summer and the idea came to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director’s wife had been working with some teenagers to do a performance of parts of the play, but the idea didn’t really get off the ground, and so I suggested that we performed music from Purcell’s opera The Fairy Queen, which is his take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have a very good friend in Moscow who I have known almost since I arrived, she works in the Bolshoi; she’s a soprano and we had readings from the play interspersed with her singing, so she basically sang the whole opera alone and people went wild for that, well, not wild perhaps, but relatively wild!
AP: They enjoyed it a lot?
EMK: Yes. And it was held in a park, which made it a little bit special.
AP: I’d imagine a natural setting like that lends itself quite well to the material.
EMK: It certainly does. I have a very happy memory of playing Vaughn-Williams’ The Lark Ascending in that park and of having leaves dropping onto my violin as I was playing! After that, we did two more concerts that year. We were raising money for Big Change, a charity that helps orphanage leavers get the equivalent of what we’d call in England NVQs or GNVQs. A lot of these kids can barely read and have problems with basic numeracy so these training courses are really important for them as it helps them to get jobs and be self-sufficient. This charity is really doing a brilliant job. They’re a small charity, I think they have about five teachers but they’re absolutely dedicated to their students and they help them in the home because obviously if you’ve been cared for all your life, you wouldn’t know how to cook, how to clean, how to use a washing machine, so in the first place it’s life skills more than anything else, and then all the numeracy and literacy and trade skills come after that. We’re very happy to support them. And in 2015 the charity asked if we could keep doing these concerts because the money we were raising was really making a difference. That year we were joined by Joy Womack, so she danced for us in our Easter concert and then when we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream again she danced for us with one of her partners from the Kremlin Ballet, and of course that was wonderful. We had two singers from the Bolshoi and two dancers from the Kremlin Ballet. So we were making progress. And then last year we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream once more, we were joined by a bass. In previous versions we had had two female singers and then we met Kirill Lebedev, who is a bass baritone and a die-hard fan of Purcell. He has sung most of his operas and has the very specific technique needed to be able to do it well. So we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream last year and we had this story where Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream both fell off the shelf and the pages got mixed up together and we were none the wiser! Last year was the 500th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and also the 125th anniversary of Sergei Prokofiev’s birth, and he wrote the music for the ballet Romeo and Juliet, so we combined the music of Prokofiev and Purcell, which is a strange mix but it actually worked.
AP: Fantastic!
EMK: Yeah, we had Hermia and Demetrius and Queen Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then we had Romeo and Juliet and a friend of mine who is a contemporary dancer danced Puck for us. She cavorted around the stage causing mischief.
AP: Mischief and tragedy, that’s an odd combination!
EMK: It is rather! But Prokofiev when he wrote the ballet, he was toying with the idea of giving it a happy end because he thought that it’s such a sad story, and why couldn’t Romeo realise at the time what was going on? So we felt that we weren’t taking too many liberties and that Prokofiev would have understood what we were doing!
AP: That’s a really interesting detail. It kind of gives the lie to the idea that Russians are always totally happy to say ‘no, everyone is going to end up miserable because that is more realistic!’ instead of going for a so-called ‘Hollywood ending’. Nice to know that it’s not always the case!
EMK: No, he wasn’t quite happy with that idea, so we thought we were nodding in his direction a bit. Then in the autumn we were invited to the British ambassador’s residence to perform a gala concert of British and Russian opera, which was very grand of course, and after that the ambassador decided to nominate me for the award so that’s how it came about.
AP: What do you have on the horizon, in terms of upcoming projects?
EMK: We’re already thinking about Easter. Western Easter and Orthodox Easter line up this year so it’s a good opportunity to put Russian and British music alongside each other. Then in the summer we’ll have A Midsummer Night’s Dream again. So those are our two mainstays and then whatever happens will happen in addition to those two things.
AP: Speaking of Easter, there was one person you brought to my attention in preparing for this and that’s the composer James MacMillan. How would you describe his music?
EMK: It’s deeply rooted in both his Scottish heritage and in his faith. His music combines those two aspects. For example, Kiss on Wood, the piece you probably heard, for me, and this is my subjective analysis, when I play it I have images of the Scottish Highlands, I picture myself in this rugged landscape, finding a very small old church and just going inside to meditate before the cross, because it’s both inherently Scottish and incredibly deep, I think.
AP: It’s probably quite a superficial comparison, but I sometimes see similarities between things Scottish and things Russian. They have certain things in common, as far as the harsh, cold climate…
EMK: The austerity?
AP: The austerity, yeah, and the intensity as well.
EMK: Another composer we’re hoping to feature is John Tavener. He was British and in the 60s he was championed by the Beatles. He wrote quite avant-garde music initially and then later in his career he started to draw inspiration from the Orthodox faith. So there’s quite an interesting parallel there. A British person looking to Eastern Orthodoxy and Russian traditions for his inspiration.
AP: Well, that, if you’ll forgive the pun, that seems like a wonderful note to end on!
Photographs courtesy of Alexander Kabanov. More photos of the Globus Music ensemble can be viewed here. Emma-Marie Kabanova's Instagram profile can be viewed here.
