Hello, take a look at a few most important news we’ve got for the next couple weeks.

► Hélène Grimaud — Artist of the month this May
►▼ Concert with orchestra
►▼ Chamber concert
►▼ Solo recital
► The Mystery of Paul the Apostle — new opera title in our repertoire
► Stars of the White Nights Festival — ten days left till it starts
► This week at the Mariinsky

Artist of the month, our season-wide initiative, continues this month: our artist-in-resience this May is the French pianist Hélène Grimaud. The main idea behind our initiative is to give an opportunity for an artist to perform in three different concerts within a month on stage of our Concert Hall. This gives artist a chance of expressing themselves in a variety of ways and thus demonstrating their talents and mastery. Programming for these concerts was done by the pianist herself, so, given these “constraints”, she has got quite a freedom in selecting a variety of works and shaping the program of these three concerts for audiences in St Petersburg.

The three concerts starring Hélène Grimaud mainly include works from the Western European classical repertoire for keyboard, which clearly reflects the development and evolvement of the genre over the years. The first concert features a colourful, bright and expressively rich Ravel’s Piano Concerto in&nbdp;G major, the work of extremely wide range of colours it reveals as you start listening to it. The second concert sees a dialogue between a pair of artists, the cellist and the pianist, both virtuoso players who are focused on achieving the harmony of sounds in a duet of the two instruments. The third concerto gives the pianist the best chance for expressing herself in demonstrating the depth and technical finesse in performing a range of works for piano solo, as well as possibly making some nice musical gifts for her most faithful concert-goers.

The French pianist Hélène Grimaud clearly feels the music she performs very deeply. She lacks nothing in power, intensity and technical finesse. One encounters a sense of fantasy.
Julian Haylock, Classic FM (London)

Concert, Mariinsky Concert Hall
Pavel Piano Concerto in G major
Ravel Suite from the ballet Daphnis et Chloé
Mahler Symphony 10 (Adagio)
Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre
Soloist Hélène Grimaud
Conductor Valery Gergiev
Sunday 23 May, 12:00noon
More info | Tickets: 900…1500 rub.

Right after this concert, Hélène Grimaud, Valery Gergiev and members of our Orchestra are flying to Germany, where we are to perform at a couple prestigious music festivals in Braunschweig and Dresden. We shall write more about this tour in our next e-newsletter. Hélène will be back in St Petersburg and will continue her recitals as our Artist of the month.

Concert, Mariinsky Concert Hall
Brahms Sonata E minor
Schumann Fantasy pieces
Shostakovich Sonata
Debussy Sonata
Soloist Clemens Hagen (cello)
Soloist Hélène Grimaud
Thursday 27 May, 7:00PM
More info | Tickets: 800…2000 rub.

Concert, Mariinsky Concert Hall
Beethoven Piano Sonata in E major
Bach Prelude and Fugue in A minor
Bach–Liszt Prelude and Fugue in A minor
Liszt Sonata in B minor
Bartók Six Romanian dances
Soloist Hélène Grimaud
Friday 28 May, 7:00PM
More info | Tickets: 800…2000 rub.

14 April saw a world premiere of the staged version of The Mystery of Paul the Apostle, an opera by Nikolai Karetnikov. This work looks at a number of things that make a human being self-contradictory at times, such as: the good and the evil, the allowed and the forbidden, the fame and the neglect, the perishableness and the immortality etc.

It took over 30 years in order to complete this piece of music for the composer, who lived in the second half of the XX-th century. In some way, the work has become his spiritual will. In fact, this is an opera-oratorio as the chorus plays a crucial role in realising many of composer’s ideas. Three main characters are all expressed using male voices: the tenor (Nero), the baritone (Tigellin) and the bass (Paul the Apostle).

The production was staged by a team directed by Alexei Stepanyuk. It reveals a series of ideas that display the strory of this opera in ten scenes in a convicing and somewhat realistic way (as much as we can imagine the Roman Empire during the Nero’s time!). Prior to this stage production the work was heard only in a concert form (it received its actual premiere in Hannover in 1995, conducted by Valery Gergiev). Staging a work of such enormous spiritual context is already quite a job on its own. The production team came up with a proposal where the most problematic aspects of spiritual human life ought to be placed at the foreground. This way everyone who attends the opera gets a chance of making their own choice between the attractive and the obnoxious, between the important and the mediocre, between the eternal and the temporary. It is worth mentioning though, that the ideas behind the opera itself are so strong that they demand a listener to constantly be “on guard” and to follow the opera, as sometimes one could revalue things in a totally opposite way as compared to before.

Opera, Mariinsky Concert Hall
Nikolai Karetnikov The Mystery of Paul the Apostle
Opera in ten scenes staged by Alexei Stepanyuk

Conductor Pavel Petrenko
Thursday 20 May, 7:00PM
More info | Tickets: 1500…2500 rub.

Conductor Valery Gergiev
Saturday 5 June, 7:00PM
More info | Tickets: 1500…2500 rub.

21 May … 21 July
Mariinsky Theatre • Concert Hall • online

Nikolaj Znaider Duke Bluebeard’s Castle Kristjan Järvi Spartakus Tchaikovsky Alexei Volodin Anna Karenina Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra Nathalie Dessay Myung Whun-Chung Carmen Suite Feruccio Furlanetto Igor Zelensky Denis Matsuyev Vladimir Shklyarov Mussorgsky René Pape Justus Frantz Leonidas Kavakos Vladimir Galuzin David Geringas Ildar Abdrazakov Victoria Tereshkina Anika Vavic The Infernal Comedy Gérard Depardieu Diana Vishneva Hélène Grimaud Die Frau ohne Schatten Shchedrin Sergey Khachatryan Alexei Ratmansky Maria Guleghina Esa-Pekka Salonen Polish National Ballet Yekaterina Semenchuk Prokofiev Valery Gergiev Attila Leo Krämer Leonid Sarafanov Clemens Hagen Chopin Arkady Volodos Moscow Soloists Ensemble Elena Zhidkova Alina Somova Yuri Bashmet Boris Berezovsky Les Troyens Vasily Gerello Stephen Rügamer Ulyana Lopatkina John Malkovich Olga Borodina The Mystery of Paul the Apostle Wagner Yundi Li Yekaterina Kondaurova The Makropulos Case Alexander Romanovsky Gustavo Dudamel Christian Blackshaw

Here is what’s going on at the Mariinsky Theatre and Concert Hall from Tuesday to Tuesday 11—18 May.

Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay updated

Watch us on YouTube

Join us on Facebook

Follow us on twitter

Events in May
Events in June
Events in July

Read our previous e-newsletter, just in case you missed it.

You have received this message because you are a registered Mariinsky customer and have subscribed to the Mariinsky e-newsletter.

If you no longer wish to receive news from us you can unsubscribe by following this link and logging into your account, where you can update your settings and preferences.