[Sergei Berinsky] Symphony No.3 "And the Sky Vanished" for Bayan and Orchestra (Score-Video)

Performers: Friedrich Lips (Bayan) Dmitry Liss / Ural Philharmonic Orchestra —————— Composed in 1993 for the renowned bayan virtuoso Friedrich Lips, Sergei Berinsky’s Symphony No. 3, subtitled “And the Sky Vanished” («И небо скрылось»), stands as one of the most formidable monuments of late twentieth-century Russian orchestral literature. The work takes its conceptual departure from the apocalyptic vision of Revelation 6:14—“And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places”—while also drawing spiritual resonance from Fyodor Tyutchev’s cosmic poem The Last Cataclysm, which envisions creation submerged beneath universal waters under the silent gaze of God. Yet, rather than illustrating these biblical texts through superficial programmatic pictorialism, Berinsky constructs a terrifyingly cohesive, existential drama directly through the physical and acoustic properties of his musical materials. At the heart of the symphony lies the distinctive timbre of the bayan itself. Berinsky regarded the instrument as an acoustic paradox—a creature of tragic dissonance that he famously likened to Quasimodo: possessing an unearthly, "martian" detachment, yet animated by a palpably living human breath. To translate this duality into symphonic form, Berinsky dispenses with traditional, broad melodic themes in favor of sharp, expressive interval-cells, or "lexemes." Two polar musical forces generate the entire work: an ascending perfect fourth, embodying a stern, supra-personal, and imperative divine will; and a descending minor second, an ancient musical emblem of human weeping, vulnerability, and doom. Spanning an unbroken continuum of 482 bars, the symphony is cast in an idiosyncratic, single-movement variant of sonata form characterized by what scholars describe as a "ruptured" architecture. The first half of the work unfolds under the dramatic principles of an instrumental concerto. Here, the solo bayan acts as a prophetic narrator, introducing each thematic idea in turn. In the exposition, the aggressive quartal principal theme is answered by the weeping, chromatic sighs of the subsidiary and closing sections, where imitative dialogue evokes bleak desolation. Berinsky’s orchestration in this first half is extraordinarily disciplined: aware of the acoustic reality that the bayan’s compact resonance chamber cannot compete with full orchestral mass, he isolates the soloist in stark monologues or fragile, chamber-like pairings with solo flutes and muted brass. The orchestra’s interventions are sudden and terrifying, most notably where wild horn glissandi and menacing brass fanfares evoke the mocking laughter of apocalyptic angelic trumpets. The structural and metaphysical turning point arrives precisely at the mathematical Golden Section—the central solo cadenza at bar 295, marking the exact midpoint of the work’s twenty-two-minute duration. Here, the soloist drives the instrument to its physical threshold, unleashing dense, keyboard-spanning tone clusters through violent bellows action. At this climatic rupture, the score introduces a pivotal performance directive: “switch on the microphone” (включить микрофон). This introduction of electronic amplification (amplificatio) functions not merely as a practical acoustical remedy, but as the catalyst for an ontological metamorphosis—a phenomenon theorist Oleg Sokolov terms a "genre modulation." Equipped with amplified projection, the bayan abandons its role as an embattled, individual concerto soloist. In the ensuing mirror-like reprise, it is seamlessly integrated into the orchestral collective. The previously fragmented development material returns in reverse and inversion; yet rather than opposing the orchestra, the bayan now moves in tandem with the tutti, executing furious, symmetrical passagework where descending figures in the soloist mirror soaring lines in the orchestra. Through this timbral transfiguration, the symphony traverses Mark Aranovsky's archetypal semantic invariant of the genre: shifting from the purposeful conflict of the individual (homo agens) and the frenzied dance of death (homo ludens) into an all-encompassing, collective expanse (homo communius). When the apocalyptic tempest finally exhausts itself, the music settles into a hushed, sonorous coda (homo meditans). The solo voice dissolves into a timeless, suspended continuum of orchestral resonance—a haunting musical realization of a post-cataclysmic universe, frozen in awe before the infinite. —————— I do not own neither the score, nor the recordings used in this video. This is only for educational purposes. If you have any complaints regarding copyright issues, please write to me directly at asorabji20(at)gmail(dot)com before submitting a report to YouTube and I will remove the video ASAP.