Ru
EnAndrievskaya G.
Musical performing art of the later 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries in A. Ossovskiy’s critical and publicistic heritage
The author of the article draws his attention to the critical and publicistic heritage by Alexander Ossovskiy (1871–1957), a famous St. Petersburg musicologist, researcher, organizer of Arts, pedagogue. His active work as a musical critic (since the middle of the 1890s till the 1910s) was connected with the definite epoch named the Silver Age of Russian culture. The staggering intensity of those-time musical life in St. Petersburg, a variety of individual artistic searching and promising tendencies predetermined A. Ossovskiy’s special interest in modern composing and performing creative work. The elucidation of the latter one in critical essays by A. Ossovskiy is characterised in two aspects. The first one implies an interpretation of the musical critic’s social-cultural predestination as a «chronicler» of important events in the concert philharmonic and musical theatre process. The second aspect correlates with individual comprehension of fundamental categories in the artistic interpretation. For A. Ossovskiy, these «principles» are «conceptuality» (pithiness predetermined by a certain exalted idea) and «refinement» (the optimum balance between two interacting aspects such as the artist’s declared intention and the interpreter’s creating will). The author of the article examines A. Ossovskiy’s definite personal predilection for actual performing problems of the opera theatre art. This predilection may be inspired by the synthetic character of the opera genre which deliberately gives the performer the maximum of expressive means and methods. Apart from this, A. Ossovskiy believed the artistic representation of the national attitude deep sources to be an indubitable prerogative for the contemporary vocal theatre art. In the author’s opinion, in many respects these «constants» of A. Ossovskiy’s musical critical heritage predestined the subject of his later research works. There is also an indisputable «heuristic prospect» of these «constants» retraced in the following evolution of the Russian musical critics.
Key words
Alexander Ossovskiy, musical critics of the Silver Age, musical performing art, performing interpretation.
For citation
Andrievskaya G. Musical performing art of the later 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries in A. Ossovskiy’s critical and publicistic heritage // South-Russian musical anthology. 2020. N 1. P. 91–95.
