An Evening Filled with Intensity and Neurosis: Closing of the Novi Sad Film Festival
Ernesto Sabato’s Report on the Blind and Shnitke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings interpreted by John Malkovich and Anastasya Terenkova
The grand closing of the third edition of the Novi Sad Film Festival brought together a top-tier team of artists and presented a challenging musical and literary program.
John Malkovich read Report on the Blind by Ernesto Sabato, while, in counterpoint, pianist Anastasya Terenkova performed the Concerto for Piano and Strings by the Russian composer Alfred Shnitke.
The Camerata Novi Sad orchestra was conducted by Armenian maestro Sergei Smbatyan.
The artists set high expectations for the audience.
Shnitke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings (1979) is one of his best-known and most frequently performed works. The composer employs his characteristic polystylistic language, combining elements of Baroque, Romanticism, avant-garde, and popular music. The composition unfolds in a continuous flow, brimming with tension, dramatic contrasts, and sudden shifts from lyrical passages to violent musical gestures. The piano in this score plays an ambivalent role – at times soloistic and virtuosic, at other times blending with the strings into a unified sonic mass.
Report on the Blind is part of Sabato’s novel On Heroes and Tombs. It is one of the darkest chapters in Latin American literature, in which the main character, Fernando, narrates a paranoid idea about a secret society of blind people controlling the world. The text is rich in metaphysical, psychological, and existential layers, exploring themes of power, control, and human helplessness in the face of the unknown. Sabato creates a claustrophobic and unsettling atmosphere, which in artistic adaptations often serves as a powerful counterpoint to music and stage interpretation.
The parallel performance of these two highly intense works unfolded within a skillfully designed dramaturgy.
Actor John Malkovich, an intriguing personality known for his distinctive acting style, interpreted Sabato’s text with a constant interplay of irony, neurosis, and at times, madness. The monodrama gained additional intensity through Shnitke’s music, which became a powerful support to the text itself.
The intensity of the musical flow, in the magnificent interpretation by Anastasya Terenkova, encouraged the audience to experience more deeply the inner states of Fernando, the main character of Report on the Blind. Terenkova skillfully balances between virtuosic passages and moments of calm, which form the essence of the piano part. At times, one could sense that the music and text were mutually dependent. This effect was especially enhanced by the fact that Malkovich and Terenkova have collaborated for many years on similar performances, which in their interpretations feel almost lifelike.
Moreover, the neurosis of the main character in their rendition became human, tangible, and more understandable even to a regular audience member.
Although the intention was for text and music to remain independent, in perception they inevitably intertwined – thanks to the selection of a musical piece capable of matching the textual source, and vice versa.
An outstanding orchestra and a pictorial conductor
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An outstanding orchestra and a pictorial conductor 〰️
A large part of the expressive weight was also borne by the Camerata Novi Sad, an orchestra composed of exceptional musicians. Their performance of Shnitke’s concerto was magnificent and artistically accomplished. To complete the evening, the orchestra also performed several well-known pieces of film music. Standout performances included Nino Rota’s Cinema Paradiso and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which, although not originally written for film, remain widely recognized due to their extensive use in cinematic art.
Maestro Sergei Smbatyan possesses a unique, somewhat undefined conducting technique, which appears more pictorial than precise. Yet this seems not to hinder the orchestra – in the preparation of the musical material, he clearly provides enough guidance, even if it is barely visible in his gestures.
This successful event offered the audience a contemporary form of combining theater and classical concert, a model that provides at least an hour-long escape from the reality we witness.