Kulikova Plays Kozlov on her Final Omni Video

Irina Kulikova playing “Ballad for Beautiful Elena” (screenshot from the Omni Foundation YouTube video)

As was announced this past Monday, the last of the six videos produced by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts in association with The Romero Sessions presenting solo performances by guitarist Irina Kulikova is now available for viewing. The selection is “Ballad for Beautiful Elena,” composed by Russian guitarist Viktor Kozlov, which, as was already observed, the composer dedicated to his wife. Like the previous videos, this is a live recording of a performance that took place at the Romero Shop in Los Angeles. The videographers were Gary and Jenny San Angel, and the Mastering Engineer was Daniel Ho.

It was also previously noted that the music was only about three and one-half minutes in duration. Within that brief span of time, Kulikova deftly captured the intimacy of Kozlov’s rhetoric, even if she, herself, was detached from both the composer and his wife. The theme is a relatively simple one, but Kulikova’s interpretation mined a rich diversity of approaches to both phrasing and sonorities in her reading of the marks on paper that accounted for the score. One advantage of YouTube is that, when one enjoys a performance, it is easy to experience it again. My guess is that any attentive listener will decide, while the final credits are rolling, that a second listening will be in order.