ISSUE MAGAZINE
Jan-Willem
Dikkers
Julia Vorontsova
From St. Petersburg With Love
When I first met Julia Vorontsova, a
21-year-old self-taught singer/songwriter originally from St.
Petersburg, little did I know that actually listening to her
first EP Julia would be a strange passage of no return into a world
of emotional complexity lifted straight out of a Dostoyevski
novel. The songs on her recently completed full-length album, From St. Petersburg with Love, which are sung in her mother tongue, are particularly
mature yet also familiar, evoking universal human emotions.
A few weeks later Julia played some songs
for several friends, and the group experienced something unique—a
self-proclaimed amateur guitarist finger-picking her way
through complex melodic patterns while singing effortlessly
with tremendous harmonious range. It wasn’t so much that
this exceeded the listeners’ expectations, but rather
that a pretty rare picture was beginning to take shape—that
of a person who is uniquely talented in the virginal stages of
actually understanding what may be. Although she seemed to be
at ease playing for others, Julia had yet to make her debut
public performance, which took place in a rather underground
venue in her new hometown of Jersey City, the Water Bug Hotel.
Performing was not something that she had expected or
anticipated and she claimed that she could not feel anything
beneath her knees, but her stage presence captivated even the
most skeptical listeners. Over the next few months Julia
performed at a variety of respected venues in New York,
including Siné, Tonic, and The Knitting Factory.
It was clear to me that this novice
musician deserved to be presented to our readers. Through this
process I became aware of the extent to which her magnetic
presence has affected her close circle of supporters and fond
admirers. As I was drawn toward the center of this circle I
sensed more and more that she was being made into a statue, a
deity, a presence meant not to exist, develop, and flourish,
but rather be immortalized.
St. Petersburg with Love is a beautiful album containing twenty-four
songs, a repertoire that practically exhausts seven years of
archived material. The album includes a booklet with selected
translations, additional commentary, and drawings. Julia is
also currently working on publishing an extensive book of her
poetry illustrated by the artist Sergei Batovrin, who has
written the following text about her.
Since Julia inhabits a special contemporary
niche, it is no surprise that so much has developed in less
than nine months. Her expressive diversity and talents are
becoming neatly organized and encapsulated, as if she were a
found treasure from the past. Yet with her artistic life just
beginning, her work beckons us to imagine just what is to come.
(Abatonbookcompany)
___
Sergei Batovrin
Julia Vorontsova as a contradiction to Pico
della Mirandola
Before fever exhausted a list of questions
that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola proposed to his
contemporaries in 15th-century Florence, the author of De hominis dignitate questioned
why man has never been restricted to one particular position on
the hierarchical ladder of Creation, sharing sensitivities with
animals, rationalism with human kind, and talents with angels.
The voice of Julia Vorontsova may easily instill a thought that
among Pico’s principal observations on human nature, the
former two do not apply to this young Russian poet and
songwriter.
In the bestiary of audible arts, amid
contemporary imitations of sorrows and purported pains of
mortal existence, an authentic melancholy is an odd
species.
While variegated pretensions and ersatz
expressionism are bred in musical genres by aspirations for
attention, Julia Vorontsova is almost unique in her melancholic
authenticity. On stage this shy young lady does not need the
aid of any choreographed image as she confirms once again by
mere presence that a genuine poet is more compelling then a
chorus of poetic imitators.
The aesthetic resources that have nurtured
the songs of this St. Petersburg native, reared in Warsaw and
presently schooled in New York, are too eclectic and
individualistic to submit its musical gradient to the bevy of
tags offered to her in haste by music critics: acid? folk?
psychedelic? Russian? bard?
Among her musical predecessors are poets
Bulat Okudjava, Yury Visbor, Vladimir Visotsky, Veronica
Dolina, and other Russian bards, who have looked in the past
four decades over the necks of their guitars for the emotional
emancipation of romantic poetry through the auxiliary means of
songwriting. With very few exceptions they found that simple
melodies, intended for roles subservient to verse, took over
and diminished their poetic promises to song lyrics.
Unlike her predecessors Julia Vorontsova
remains a serious poet. Her lack of compromise in poetry, as
the point of departure from the tradition of bards, is extended
to her music. Ironically, an English-speaking audience,
captivated by Julia’s voice, is unaware of the
subordinate position that she offers to music in her native
tongue.
In language or music Julia’s poetry
belongs to a faithfully contemporary incarnation of the same
romantic spirit which last ruled Europe in post-Napoleonic era,
when Lord Byron traveled to Missolonghi, Chateaubriand fancied
the language of the Seminole tribe, and Lermontov joked his way
into his final duel on the rainy slope of Mt. Mashuk. It is
this same spirit of timeless romanticism that a century
later has protected poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva and Anna
Akhmatova from empty-handed brandishing of phonetics in their
verse of Modern uncertainty.
An American monoglot audience may not
notice that Julia prefers intonations descended from Tsvetayeva
and that her vocabulary relies on choices inspired by Joseph
Brodsky. Yet the ghostly spirit of romanticism vocalized anew
through her songs need no assistance of interpreter to remain
bare on stage.
In the age when industrious humanity is
serenely drowning in the waste of its own insipid hypocrisy and
practical ambitions, the melancholy of this young poet is
present among the infallible reminders of volatility natural
for human spirit.
