Interview pour le magazine néerlandais
MEDIA LOFT02.02.2023
Alexei Filimonov is a pianist and composer who graduated from the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music. He is a graduate of the Gnessin Academy of Music and winner of several international competitions in Switzerland, Monaco and Belgium. At various times he has collaborated with renowned musicians in Russia and Europe, and has composed and staged a mono-opera at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre as well as several concert programmes at the St Petersburg Philharmonic. In his music, Alexey successfully combines baroque and jazz, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the rhythms of flamenco, the works of F. Chopin, and A. Scriabin.
- You and I are now in the south of France, in a couple of weeks you’ll be playing shows in Dubai, and in spring 2023 you have a tour of Europe planned, right?- For various reasons the contract had to be interrupted, but the company still invited me to stay for a month in the south of France, with full board. It all happened so suddenly that I was stumped for a while by what happened. But after two or three days, I realised that I had been given time to start doing something new: it was likely to be a future residence permit in this country. This is how I interpreted another twist of fate. Everything that happens to us all of a sudden is for something, I have learnt this through the years. I arrived here, settled in and started to collect the documents for a residence permit.
- That’s very interesting, tell me more!- France is probably the only country today that grants residence permits to creative people and artists, and for four years at a time: here it is called a talent passport. In addition, it is possible to apply together with your family and apply for a permit for all of them at the same time. In this situation it is very important to think positively: you ask to live and work in France not because you feel bad at home, but because you can do more here. This is not an option for refugees, not a way of crossing the border to avoid mobilisation but rather an opportunity to move forward.
A passport talent is a special or simplified document that entitles the holder to remain in France for a long period of time (generally four years). The advantage of this migration scheme is that requests for a passport-talent are processed as a priority, i.e. faster than requests for a residence permit for work or documents for the self-employed.
- It turns out that now, as a hundred years ago, the creative intelligentsia gathers in France...- Opening up new horizons in general is characteristic of creative people: great things are seen from a distance, pardon the platitude. People think they’re playing a new game, but it’s all been there before. Open Zinaida Gippius’s memoirs - there it is interesting to describe what was the forerunner of the revolution, because she and D. Merezhkovsky were inside the whole ‘silver age’ in St.Petersburg.
There are many parallels between the early 20th century in Russia and what is going on there now: Dugin’s Eurasianism and the Schlaining of that time, Alexander Blok’s Scythians and the painful search for identity after the collapse of the USSR.
And given the fact that the intelligentsia gathers in France, there are many “Russian” places, and where else but here to try to realize the great things that have happened to Russia over the last 30 years. It seems to me that striving to Paris is part of the cultural code of the Russian intelligentsia and has become akin to searching for the “Promised Land”...