28.11.2011

The World of Theatre and Music with Valery Gergiev

On 4 December at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre Valery Gergiev will be hosting a concert and meeting of young concert-goers as part of the cultural and educational project The World of Theatre and Music with Valery Gergiev.

This season saw the launch of a major Mariinsky Theatre project consisting of two subscription series – the Academy of Young Theatre-Goers for primary and middle-school age children which has proven incredibly popular with the target audience – and the only on-line subscription series in the world – Eras and Styles, designed for teenagers and students by those training at the Academy of Young Singers under Larisa Gergieva. All subscription series concerts and performances are filmed using media broadcast equipment and the Mariinsky Theatre’s mobile television station and are broadcast via http://mariinsky.tv/n/. These recordings will be used to produce DVDs and the initiative will give children living in remote regions throughout Russia the opportunity to discover the world of classical music and theatre.

One of the Mariinsky Theatre’s priorities in terms of its educational work is to get children and teenagers to play an active role, resulting in younger, emergent audiences of children through to university-age students being able to gain an insight into arts education. The World of Theatre and Music with Valery Gergiev project will meet these aims.

One highlight of the programme comes with a concert on 4 December featuring Valery Gergiev, at which the maestro will be appearing as both conductor and narrator. The programme of the first half of the concert will feature works from various eras and styles by western composers, ranging from classical works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to the impressionism of Claude Debussy; the second half of the concert will deal exclusively with classical Russian music. During the interval maestro Gergiev will answer questions from those watching the broadcast on-line. Anyone wishing to do so may send their questions to media@mariinsky.ru in advance and Valery Gergiev will pick out the most interesting ones to answer.