Donemus Webwinkel — Filanovsky, Boris

Born 1968 in Leningrad. Graduated from St. Petersburg State Conservatory in 1995. Studied at IRCAM in 1998. Master-classes with Louis Andriessen, Paul-Heinz Dittrich. In 2000-2012 he was artistic leader of eNsemble, the only sinfonietta-like contemporary music group in St.Petersburg. Accomplished numerous musical projects, among them “Pythian Games” (annual composers’ competition with anonymous performance and public voting) and “Step Aleft” (competition for young composers). In total eNsemble has commissioned and premiered about a hundred works by new Russian composers.
2003 – 24th Irino Prize for Chamber Music, Tokyo.
2005 – shortlisted for final round of Third Competition “Music of 21 Century”, Seoul. 2006 – artist-in-residence in Djerassi, California.
2010 – shortlisted for Youtube Russia composition competition, Moscow
2013/14 – artist-in-residence at Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD.
Member of Structural Resistance Group (StRes) that unites six influential Russian composers of his generation. Since 2005, Filanovsky performs as vocalist/narrator, with a dozen of works by Russian composers dedicated to him. As a performer of his own works and works by other composers collaborated with such artists as Teodor Currentzis, Reinbert de Leeuw, Pierre Roullier, Roland Kluttig, Fedor Lednev, Kirill Serebrennikov.
Works commissioned by such festival as Maerzmusik, Klangspuren, Transart, Éclat, Diaghilev, Other Space; by such collectives as ensemble mosaik, KNM Berlin, Orkest de Volharding, DoelenEnsemble, Slagwerk Den Haag, Da Capo Chamber Players, ensemble Intégrales, Quatuor Diotima, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.
Works performed by Svetlanov Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski, musicAeterna / Teodor Currentzis, Schoenberg Ensemble / Reinbert de Leeuw, eNsemble / Fedor Lednev, 2e2m / Pierre Roullier, John Størgårds, Avanti! Chamber Orchestra / Susanna Mälkki, KNM Berlin, ensemble mosaik, Nieuw Ensemble / Otto Tausk, Orkest De Volharding / Jurjen Hempel, Gerrie de Vries, DoelenEnsemble, Frances-Marie Uitti, Russian National Orchestra, The Ural Philharmonics / Dmitri Liss.
Major works include Throughchant on Woruld Sprouting (Propéven’ o Prórosli Miróvoy) for ten soloists, choir, ad orchestra, Three Four, an off-theatre opera on texts by famous Russian conceptual poet Lev Rubinstein (staged in 2013 by Dmitry Volkostrelov), Drillalians, a part of the opera serial on the book by Boris Yukhananov (staged in June 2015 by Boris Yukhananov).
Filanovsky has also composed a number of large-scale works for unusual sets and circumstances, such as Collectivision for 7 mouth harmonicas and accordion, Voicity, an open-air for military and building technique (realized at an abandoned military base in North Tirol), La machine fleuve for 20 music boxes and bicycle (with Arno Fabre), Cantus with Cleansing for seven Balkan guslari, Tristans LIebestod un Nachspiel for three historic pianos of different epochs, Arkhitekton Theta, a sound body for ensemble, choir, and moving audience, and Sefer Yetzirah for voices and middle-age instruments.
Filanovsky is proteistic by nature, feeling himself as a Stravinsky-like creative type. He experiences strong tension to documentary texts and generative poetry (Scompositio, Words and Spaces, bzdmn, He made forty) as well as Russian nonsense verses (A Certain Quantity of Conversations, Jánko Krul Albánskaj, Lesvét Setmy). From other side, he feels the spirit of deconstruction and plays with performing habits (We can’t perform it, Schmozart, play.list, Der Lauf der Dinge) .
Last years Filanovsky works upon some unusual concepts and practices that put in question commonplaces of composing and consuming music. These are: – direct music, peer-to-peer composition and delivery; anyone can commit him to write a personal piece handwritten and performed by the author; – chain orchestra: a sound body impossible to be heard from any single point, presuming listener’s movement; this is a concept in-between artifact and event, concert and installation, stable form and quest, ‘philharmonia’ and public space; – infinite superposition: a work nonlinearly growing from its primary state as a row of consequent footprints / iterations resulting in standalone pieces. Nevertheless, IS as a whole has no form in usual sense; rather, it exists as a total of all its iterations, like a folksong exists as a sum of all its known variants.