Mahler’s Seventh Symphony to be performed in Moscow and St Petersburg

On 23 December the orchestra will give its traditional pre-New Year concert at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, and on 24 December it will be performing at the Great Hall of the St Petersburg Philharmonic as part of the XII Arts Square International Winter Festival.

One month ago at the  Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome Valery Gergiev gave three performances of the  Seventh Symphony with the orchestra of the Accademia, bringing to a close the Year of Mahler and the “crossover” Year of Russia and Italy. Over the course of the outgoing year maestro Gergiev has performed this symphony with the  London Symphony Orchestra in New York, Paris, London and Birmingham.

British critic Christopher Thomas noted that the unique nature of Gergiev’s interpretation was almost “obsessive in its attention to tempi and structure.” As maestro Gergiev himself has stated, “Conducting Mahler’s Seventh was for me the scariest project of them all. I dread this symphony” as it “strikes terror” when revealing the  path to its “strange shape and finding a route through its issues of ‘direction, line and proportion.’”.

The concerts start at 20:00.