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[GUITAR PLAYING] SPEAKER: Oleg Timofeyev plays a Russian seven-string guitar.

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He learned it so he could play medieval music, never dreaming he would perform 20th century Russian music. Then he discovered the work of Georgian-born composer, Matvei Pavlov-Azancheev. He created a body of work for the Russian seven-string guitar while languishing in a Soviet labor camp during the Stalin years. This weekend, Timofeyev performs some of the works in a program called guitar in the gulag. He told MPR's Mindy Ratner that one of the pieces, called The Great Patriotic War, operates on a number of levels.

OLEG TIMOFEYEV: I find this sonata, The Great Patriotic War, absolutely mind boggling because it's a combination of very good composer and combination of very good music writing with a lot of extra musical ideas that would seem-- had somebody else work that way, they would have been probably inappropriate. For example, he employs Morse code a little bit. I can show a moment. This is the beginning of the Gulag Sonata. It starts like a waltz.

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And so on. And then after a point, after, this nice waltz goes--

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Suddenly there is a dissonant chord.

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And then comes--

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This theme played with artificial harmonics, it is the most well-known radio signal actually from Soviet times. And the extramusical idea here is that the nation was having wonderful pre-war life, peaceful life that represented by that waltz. And then this chord is the moment when through the radio they found out about the war. I do believe that those glissando markings stand for those old fashioned radios where you had to tune and then, whoo-whoo, get the sounds like that.

And in the climax of this battle music that starts--

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--you get this very strange rhythm that is very difficult to notate.

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That I believe is a partial quotation from SOS. The complete SOS would have been--

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But it's not really possible. So he hints like that. So there is a lot of little things like that. But it's so nicely crafted and so nicely written for the instrument that you can enjoy the music without even knowing all of that.

MINDY RATNER: In addition to his Sonata, Pavlov-Azancheev also wrote some small pieces. Did he not?

OLEG TIMOFEYEV: Absolutely. I have a very nice, little serenade written not by the words I have. I mean, that I happen to have the original. It's called Spanish Serenade, and it has a very nice-- I mean, it's a yellowish piece of paper that was sent from there. I have that very letter. On the one side in thin pencil, very neatly he wrote the Spanish Serenade.

And on the other side, there is a letter of September 23rd, 1948, in which he tells his friend Alexander Maximov about his plans, how he wants to write a Chinese dance in the Chinese style, how he used most of the tobacco that was sent to him and bacon and didn't receive the money and doesn't know where his wife is. She also was in a labor camp. And then after this heartbreaking letter, you turn the page and you are exposed to the following nostalgic and completely remote or unrelated serenade.

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And so on.

MINDY RATNER: It's beautiful. And it gives no hint of what must have been going on in his life.

OLEG TIMOFEYEV: Exactly.

SPEAKER: Oleg Timofeyev, speaking with Minnesota Public Radio's Mindy Ratner. He'll perform Guitar in the Gulag on Sunday at Saint Paul's On The Hill Church in Saint Paul. You can hear more of the interview and more music on the Minnesota Public Radio website at minnesotapublicradio.org.

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