“Kalina Krasnaya” (The Red Guelder-Rose, or The Red Snowball Tree) was composed by Evgeny Svetlanov in 1975 as a memorial tribute to Vasily Shukshin (1929–1974), the distinguished film director, writer, and actor, who died prematurely at the age of forty-five. The work derives its title from Shukshin’s final film “The Red Snowball Tree” (ru: Kalina Krasnaya) and incorporates a number of allusions, notably to the popular song “Kalina Krasnaya” (which may also have provided the film’s title) and to the medieval Dies Irae sequence.
“The premature death of the artist stirred up everything I had seen in “Kalina Krasnaya”, everything I had read in his stories. The result was the symphonic poem of the same name. In my view, Shukshin was an artist who was ahead of his time.”
Evgeny Svetlanov