Maksim Barbash

Enjoying subtle strokes of affection with , playing Pesson

Preparation for the June madness has begun. Working on Combier piece with

My draft on detuned

Part 2 of my crazy finger flexibility exercise is here — and yes, I made it harder. Enjoy the challenge 😉

I want to share with you a small exercise which I recently came up with for finger flexibility and thumb coordination — all inspired by violin technique. Share with me your experience after trying it.

A Thousand Tongues

Yes, I have a thousand tongues,
And nine and ninety-nine lie.
Though I strive to use the one, It will make no melody at my will, But is dead in my mouth.

Text by Stephen Crane
Music and electronics by Missy Mazzoli

Images in music don’t always appear, and they aren’t always fitting — but in this excerpt of one of my most beloved works, Bloch’s Rhapsody, I see King Solomon grieving over the fragility, injustice, and cruelty of this world. The suffering that comes to everyone, yet strikes each person differently. And all the hustle around — like those ants, busy with their affairs without a glance backward. But there is always room for hope. And this cry of the cello, soaring over a scorched field after battle — that is the image I live through together with Bloch’s music.

Imagine a cyberpunk future where iron and steel merge with flesh and blood. Chips pulse alongside our neurons. And in this perfectly functioning, robotised world, the question haunting every individual is the same: «What is a soul — and do I have one?»

Gordon’s Industry for solo cello, in our Anima Mechanica program, embodies that mechanical body — forged from steel and iron, soulless, incapable of self-reflection, pushing the limits of what a humanoid can endure.

Sciarrino himself described his Piano Trio No. 2 as ‘something marvellous and altogether mechanical’ — a striking resonance with our Anima Mechanica concept. In the piece, the fragile organic world of the strings — all breath, harmonics, and shivering gossamer — embodies the Anima, only to be disrupted by the piano’s explosive, mechanical interventions.

Tonight performed a newly written piece by .go for cello and 9 singers.