New Series Interviews - Part I
Felipe Boreli Filho: Hi there Anton! It´s a pleasure to talk with you.
Anton Brejestovski: And you, Felipe.
Felipe: So, how do you see CAPRICE in the beginning and after the success of
Tales Of The Uninvited and
Kywitt! Kywitt!? And how were the fans reactions?
Anton:
We feel we’re moving on. We’re making progress, but we’re still in the
middle of the road and we hope our best album is yet to come.
It’s quite peculiar that
Kywitt! Kywitt!
was received better than Tales by the fan community, while Tales got
better reviews from journalists. Apparently, Kywitt is more
straightforward – so it’s easier to understand, and that’s what
attracts the fans. On the other hand, Tales are more sophisticated, and
it can require "deeper" listening (which is not quite what every fan
looks forward to), but this is exactly what attracts music journalists.
Felipe:
I read before, but don´t remember where now, that is quite difficult to
gather all CAPRICE members. So, can you tell the experience on Six
Secret Words record sessions?
Anton: It was
pretty easy for two reasons: Six Secret Words has fewer musicians, and
also we made a one-musician-at-a-time recording, so every musician
could plan their individual recording schedule.
Felipe: This is very intersting, Anton. And what´s the idea behind it?
Anton:
The overall idea is to create a 45-minute relaxation album. This idea
came from Frederic Chaplain, the owner of our record label
Prikosnovenie. It was quite a challenge for me – Caprice music usually
requires intensive listening and is not supposed to be background music.
Fred
even offered a plan for the album – that is, what kind of mood should
be in every track. I followed the plan, and when the preliminary work
was over, I listened to the whole thing. I understood that this album
could have a really magic effect if you close your eyes and try to have
a "trip" into your inner self. So, we decided to write these
"instructions" right on the album cover: Turn off the light... Close
your eyes... And listen.
At first – because the music was so
different from our other works – I even wanted to release it as "Anton
Brejestovski and Fred Chaplain", or under some other name, not Caprice.
But as the work progressed, we understood – it is Caprice, it’s just
another side of it. Having an album filled with peace and quiet was a
nice idea after
Kywitt! Kywitt!, which overwhelms the listener with its bursting energy.
Felipe:
I had the opportunity to listened to it already and it´s a dreaming
album... But what can you say about the next CAPRICE project? Do you
have a name for it yet? And what can you tell us about it?
Anton: The next album will probably have the name
Masquerade,
and it will be again completely different from our previous work. You
see, the first three decades of the 20th century are called the Silver
Age of Russian poetry. A number of amazing poets lived and worked in
that time. I decided to put some of their poetry to music. (Caprice
have done it many times before. For example, Songs of Innocence and
Experience is based on William Blake’s poetry; the first two parts of
Elvenmusic Trilogy is J.R.R. Tolkien’s work; in
Sister Simplicity and
Kywitt! Kywitt!
we use poems by various British poets. It looks like Caprice’s mission
is to "transform" the energy of poetry into the energy of music!).
Anyway,
the name Masquerade was chosen for the new album partly because in
Stalin’s times people could only live and make art hiding under a mask,
and partly because Venetian masquerade with its glorious, festive
atmosphere was an inspiration for many Russian poets. These two
opposing trends – the delight of creation and the fear of being
destroyed by the totalitarian machine for non-conformism – are
reflected in the future album’s music.
Felipe: Oh... There´s something great coming... Thank you, Anton! And see you soon for our second part interview.