Lev Zhurbin, the violist, composer and arranger who performs and writes under the name Ljova, almost always has a lot of projects before him. If he isn’t writing for, or recording with, his folk-classical ensemble, Ljova and the Kontraband, or performing in Romashka, a Gypsy band led by his wife, the singer Inna Barmash, he is working on film scores or transcriptions. (He has arranged Indian and Sephardic pieces for the Kronos Quartet; Asian and Eastern European works for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project; Schubert and Shostakovich compositions for the Knights, a chamber orchestra). But even by Ljova’s standards, the coming week is unusually packed.
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Allan Tannenbaum for The New York Times
Lev Zhurbin, the violist, composer and arranger who performs under the name Ljova, also plays in a band led by his wife.
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As part of the Silk Road Project’s residency at the American Museum of Natural History, Ljova and the Kontraband are playing three short sets on Sunday afternoon. On Tuesday evening Ljova (pronounced Ly-OH-va) joins Romashka for a rooftop performance at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, where Roman Khrushch’s new Russian-language film, “Black Lamb,” with a score by Ljova, will also be shown. And on Thursday the Kontraband offers a free evening in the recently remodeled David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, which will include a screening of “Cupcake,” a humorous film by Sean McPhillips, also with a score by Ljova.
Then, next Saturday afternoon, Ljova and the guitarist Clifton Hyde will perform a new score for a D. W. Griffith silent film, “The Girl and Her Trust,” at the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel in Brooklyn. And as soon as the film ends, Ljova plans to grab his viola and hightail it to the Bronx, to play at a wedding with his new, unnamed string quartet. (“We’re fighting about it,” he said of the naming project.)
Weddings have assumed an unusually large place in Ljova’s professional life. A picture of Romashka performing at the wedding of Miranda Brooks, a landscape designer, and Bastien Halard, an architect, was published in the August issue of Vogue. And he traces almost everything he does now — film scoring and arranging, in particular — to the 10 years he spent, reluctantly at first, as the violist in Empyreal Strings, a quartet (sometimes augmented with harp and other instruments) that played in two to four weddings most weekends.
As it happens, Ljova and Ms. Barmash, who also sings in the Kontraband, are celebrating their third anniversary on Thursday, the day of the atrium concert.
“When I mentioned that to the people at Lincoln Center,” Ljova said in a recent interview in the restaurant in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall, “they said: ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Shouldn’t you celebrate?’ But I told them, ‘This is how we celebrate.’ The day before our wedding, we played a show at Joe’s Pub, and it was partly a wedding dance, with a lot of our friends, and partly a regular concert, with lots of people we didn’t know. And it was tons of fun. Musicians in Russia celebrate this way.”
Though 20 years of living in New York have flattened his accent, Ljova was born in Moscow in 1978. (He turns 32 on Aug. 18.) His father, Alexander Zhurbin, a prolific composer best known outside Russia for his 1975 rock opera, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and his mother, Irina Ginzburg, a writer and poet, moved to New York in 1990, partly because they found the post-Soviet economy too volatile but also because anti-Semitic demonstrations left them feeling insecure. (Now both father and son return to Russia several times a year, and a festival of Alexander Zhurbin’s music is scheduled in Moscow in December, in honor of his 65th birthday.)
At first, Ljova was determined to pursue a straightforward career as a violist. As a student at Juilliard, he played in several orchestras and chamber groups, including Kristian Jarvi’s Absolute Ensemble, which in 1996 devoted a full program to Alexander Zhurbin’s music. But he was also influenced by an uncle, Yuri Gandelsman, who had been the principal violist of the Moscow Virtuosi and the Israel Philharmonic and refused to dabble in pop, musical theater or anything outside the purely classical music world.
“I wanted to be like him,” Ljova said, “a very serious viola player. And when I got into Juilliard, I thought that I would eventually get a job with the New York Philharmonic, and I could complete the trifecta of going to LaGuardia High School, Juilliard and then landing across the street at Avery Fisher Hall, so that I would spend my entire life on 65th Street.”
Then he got a call to substitute at a wedding. He knew his purist uncle would turn down the job, and he did too, at first. But the contractor called again, and he agreed, partly because the money was good and partly out of curiosity.
“It was interesting,” he said, “because it was the first time I played somewhere where people were not necessarily listening attentively. And we were using handwritten arrangements, where some of the notes felt wrong. So I did it and said goodbye. But a few weeks later, they called again, and I said no again, but in the end I played. And after that, they said: ‘Look, what’s not to like? This pays better than your community orchestra jobs. The food isn’t bad. Be reasonable.’ So I thought, I didn’t really need the money, but it was very useful for buying CDs. And this was a quartet of Russian émigrés, 10, 20, 30 years older than I was, and I thought, ‘Maybe I can learn something from this.’ ”
What he learned was how to arrange, improvise and compose.
“At first,” he said, “when there were wrong notes in the parts, I corrected them. Then I began changing them to see what other possibilities worked. Then I began writing parts that suited the personalities in the group, and from there I began improvising and learning how to play by ear.
“There were good days and bad days, but this definitely gave me a platform to try new things. I was always a viola hooligan. I almost got kicked out of music camps for doing things in chamber music class that are now called ‘extended techniques’ but were then just known as fooling around. So with my arranging, I had the freedom to fail, because people were not listening so intently that you couldn’t take chances. And that emboldened me to try new things and to compose in a less serious, less academic way.
“And all that happened because I started playing weddings.”
Ljova’s reputation as an arranger has since gotten him commissions from the Kronos Quartet, the Silk Road Project, Brooklyn Rider, the Dallas Opera and other ensembles. He also began recording his own works. For his atmospheric debut disc in 2006, “Vjola: World on Four Strings,” he multitracked viola parts, bringing in an accordionist for just one track. It occurred to him only after the fact that if he were to promote the album the usual way, performing the music live, he would need a band. So Ljova and the Kontraband was born. The group made its own first disc, “Mnemosyne,” in 2008. (Both discs are on Ljova’s own Kapustnik label.)
The recordings became useful calling cards. A copy of “Mnemosnye” that made its way to Mikhail Baryshnikov was passed along to the choreographer Aszure Barton, who said in an e-mail that she “fell in love with his music instantly upon hearing it.” She has based several works on his pieces, including “Busk,” a collaboration that will be performed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in December.
Ljova, meanwhile, has been thinking a lot about getting back to his roots.
“I would like to do more classical playing again,” he said. “I’m still hoping to learn the Janacek string quartets and play them in a concert someday. And the Bartok quartets. This is music that is easy enough to play but so difficult to make it feel improvised and balanced at the same time. And one day I’d like to play Elliott Carter’s quartets. Because to me, they sound like jazz. So I’m starting to find my way toward playing the Carter quartets with musicians who improvise. One day, one day. We’ll see how sidetracked I get.”
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