Ekaterina Dondukova
In the choir since 2018
She began her musical education at the Piano Department of the Republican Gymnasium-college under the Belarusian State Academy of Music, simultaneously studying choral conducting and music theory.
In 2009, she entered the Gnessin State Musical College, Faculty of Choral Conducting (class of Elena Kuznetsova, Honoured Cultural Worker of Russia).
Concurrently, she studied opera singing under Lyudmila Magomedova (People’s Artist of Russia, soloist of the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia) and also performed in the chamber ensemble of the Moscow Conservatory Choir.
After graduation, she entered the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Department of Opera, Orchestral and Choral Conducting (class of Professor Stanislav Kalinin, Honoured Worker of Arts of Russia).
In 2012, she created the music for the production “Zhenshchina i front” at the Hungarian Cultural Centre of the Consulate General of Hungary in St. Petersburg. She also collaborated as a composer with the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow (“Pesn’ Lyubvi”, Natasha’s Dream) and the Telpa-Daugavpils festival in Latvia (Es skrienu).
In 2015-2016, she collaborated with the ensemble Capella’415, including performances of solo cantatas by Georg Philipp Telemann.
In 2016-2018, she worked at Philipp Chizhevsky’s ensemble Questa Musica, with which she performed the opera series Drillalians (Episode III: Alexey Sioumak), Igor Stravinsky’s The Wedding and Mass, Alfred Schnittke’s Choir Concerto, George Frideric Handel’s Messiah oratorio, Henry Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen, works by Arvo Pärt, John Taverner, and Johannes Brahms.
She played Octavia in Dmitri Kourliandski’s opera “Octavia. Trepanation” (directed by Boris Yukhananov) at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and Muziekgebouw (Holland Festival, Amsterdam).
In 2018, she joined Teodor Currentzis and the musicAeterna choir. As a soloist, she has participated in several projects, including the first performance and recording of Alexey Retinsky’s Rex Tremendae and score for Medea, Bernhard Lang’s Songbook I, and Alexander Knaifel’s vocal cycle A Silly Horse.
musicAeterna choir events
Andreas Moustoukis (b. 1971)
“Liturgy of St. Leontius” for mixed choir (2021)
Im Äther for mixed choir, 4 double basses, electronics, percussion and the ondes Martenot (2023, world premiere)
performers:
musicAeterna Choir and Orchestra Soloists
Conductor Vitaly Polonsky
MusicAeterna resident composer Andreas Moustoukis presents the result of his two-year work at Dom Radio. Together with the “Liturgy of St. Leontius”, fragments of which have been repeatedly heard in the concerts by the musicAeterna Choir, on June 6, the world premiere of his new composition – IM ÄTHER (“In Ether”) for mixed choir, 4 double basses, electronics, percussion and the ondes Martenot will take place. This is a micropolyphonic work based on the poems by Paul Celan interspersed with quotations from world cinema.
The author explains the essence of the new work as follows: “Im Äther (στον αιθέρα) is the need to breath out in the stratosphere were the gravitation is low and all the time is becoming one and a single moment of a crystal silence. The past, the present and the future stop to exist between then and now in a violent and compensating ‘why’, they just exist timelessly in the cosmic black as if they were small red shining dots of love, the tears of eternity.”
Photo: Selena Zhigulskaya