Symphonic Structures

Kiril Ilievsky wrote his Symphonic Structures for the Sofia Philharmonic, and the orchestra gave the first performance anywhere on 19 June 2005, in the closing concert of the Sofia Music Weeks. The title is exact rather than decorative: the piece is built as a chain of five linked spans — Maestoso, Adagio, Allegro, Andante, Allegro vivo — that behave less like movements than like the load-bearing parts of a single arch. Each grows out of the material of the one before it, so that the slow sections are not rests between the fast ones but the places where the argument is carried. Ilievsky, born in 1955 and trained in Sofia, belongs to the generation of Bulgarian composers who came of age when the symphony orchestra had stopped being a vehicle for public statement and had become, once again, an instrument to be examined. His writing here treats the orchestra as a set of surfaces: strings held long enough to lose their edge, brass entering from underneath rather than on top, percussion used for weight rather than for accent. The result is a work that asks to be heard whole, and that rewards the listener who follows the seams between its parts instead of waiting for themes to return.