Based on Dostoevsky’s novel and under the direction of Juan Souki, this show was presented by Columbia Stages between March 7th and 10th 2007 in the theater of the Riverside Church, NYC
Composed between October 2006 and March 2007 initially for piano and Cello, then adapted for piano only.
In Crime and Punishment (C&P), like in the rest of my theater compositions, music is played live. This makes the actors and the public part of the score. It becomes richer show after show, maturing in each spectacle.
Every text and play raise a new challenge. This time I believe it was about writing in excess in order to diminish the need to compose at rehearsals (I only had one week) and creating textures that impelled the psychological atmosphere of the work - In Love (a tragic etude) I began composing by playing with the piano strings with fingers and sticks to generate certain atmospheres. In Crime & Punishment I return to these elements now adding plastic woods and a loopstation.
I wrote the base of the main theme while in NYC during the presentation of Love at the Shapiro Theatre. Months later, when C&P became official, I started rereading the classic and began thinking about which instruments I should use. Cello and piano seemed ideal. I went back to what I wrote months before and completed it with the cello, now playing the main melody of the work. It sounded like this:
As I fell lost into the book I wrote ideas, emphasized emotions and translated them into the piano. At the beginning, as in the main theme, the ideas were always strong but soon they went calm, arriving to the second more important theme of the work, Sonya and Rodya’s theme. For sometime I had wanted to write a song of pitiful love, a love somehow always lost. Phrases like “It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go” were key in the theme (I consider it a key phrase in the whole novel). This is the way it went when I put it into the piano:
Shortly before departing to NYC it became clear that we were not going to use the cello. The only theme that worried me was the main one. I would need at least one more hand to be able to do it on the piano.
Days later I would leave some ideas behind and reinforce others.
At the rehearsals I began using the loopstation instead of 
distortion and 
delay. The result was excellent. Now I can’t find a better way to represent that intense memory of childhood conveyed by taverns, horses, drunkards, and Rodya and his father. Every day I would record loops live onstage, building them little by little. Here is the first of them:
As with every incidental music, there are moments when the notes try to reach the surface and speak by themselves and there are others when they submerge behind the rest of the elements to maintain and increase the strength of the moment, like a great mass, without shades:
Finally I adapted the main theme to three hands. Rodya would accompany me on it.
After one week of rehearsals, five shows and months of composition, the score finally seems to rest.
The Cast & Crew
Billy Fenderson as Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov
Miguel Govea as Porfiry Petrovich
Melinda Helfrich as Sonya
Original novel by Dostoevsky
Concept and creation by Juan Souki
Original Score by Xavier Losada
Set Design by Jian Jung
Costume Design by Arnulfo Maldonado
Lighting Design by Lucrecia Briceño
Sound design by Marcelo Añez
Video Design by Daniel Roversi
Video Animation & Motion Graphics by Luber Mujica
Graphic Design by Carlos Angulo López
General Manager: Amy Wolf
Production Stage Manager: Heather Schings
Listen to the clips
