The Easter Festival

In line with tradition, the annual music forum will open on Orthodox Easter Sunday and close on Victory Day. The marathon tour map will cover several regions ranging from Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the north to Krasnodar and Kislovodsk in the south.

Valery Gergiev chose Sergei Prokofiev to be the symbol of this year’s festival, and to mark the occasion especially for Moscow audiences there will be a series of performances of the composer’s symphonies and piano concerti, the suite from his opera The Love for Three Oranges and highlights from the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella. Yet another gift will come in the form of Prokofiev’s Egyptian Nights symphonic suite featuring renowned Russian artists Chulpan Khamatova and Yevgeny Mironov.

At the grand opening on 15 April at the Great Hall of the Conservatoire, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will perform Sergei Prokofiev’s First and Fifth Symphonies and Piano Concerto No 1, the solo to be performed by Daniil Trifonov.

The festival performances will see appearances by outstanding pianists Denis Matsuev, Christian Blackshaw, Alexei Volodin, Olli Mustonen and Alexander Toradze, legendary Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto and soprano Nina Stemme, one of the finest Wagnerian sopranos of the present day, while the festival’s younger participants include prize-winners of the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition. One traditional feature of the festival programme will be the Mariinsky Theatre’s performances at the Moscow State University which never fail to be sell-out events.

As Gergiev stated at a press conference for the festival, the concerts “will be broadcast internationally; we have already come to an agreement with partners in Europe and America, and that means that people all over the world and not just in Russia will have a chance to discover this event.”

For details of the festival programme please go to: http://easterfestival.ru/