Saisons russes in North America

2-15 October will see the Mariinsky Orchestra undertake its latest tour of North America. The concert programme for the Mariinsky Orchestra consists entirely of instrumental masterpieces by Russian composers. This year the spotlight will fall on Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Shostakovich.

“Like my great predecessor Sergei Diaghilev, I consider it vitally important to promote Russian music throughout the world – though not just internationally but in Russia’s regions as well. These will be veritable “Russian seasons.” In past years and over the next three or four to come we have run and planned a massive series of Russian programmes – both operas and symphony music – at the greatest venues in North America. In New York alone – and not for the first time – we’re opening the season at the Metropolitan Opera now with performances of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Shostakovich’s The Nose with some amazing Russian singers, and we’re opening the season at Carnegie Hall with concerts of Russian music. Moreover, there will also be concerts of Russian music featuring the Mariinsky Orchestra this autumn at venues in Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Newark and Washington. But I don’t want to speak of that as successes of the Mariinsky Theatre, as our own successes – I mean it in the sense of the successes of the great Russian tradition and such great Russian composers as Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, known as “two of their own” in the USA, and Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich,” maestro Gergiev commented of the aim of the forthcoming tour.

One key aspect of the tour programme will be a work that has long since been considered a calling card of the Mariinsky Orchestra – Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, which celebrated its centenary throughout the music world in 2013. The Mariinsky Orchestra will be presenting a symphony version of this opus, revolutionary for the history of music in the 20^th century, along with the music of two other Russian ballets by Stravinsky – Pétrouchka and The Firebird. The music of these three famous ballets will be performed at concerts at Chicago’s Symphony Center (2 October), Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall (6 October), New York’s Carnegie Hall (10 October) and Washington’s Kennedy Center (14 October). These concerts will form an extension of the initiative of the three-week mono-festival The Russian Stravinsky at the New York Philharmonic – the longest ever such festival in the entire history of that music institution, which was conceived and directed by Valery Gergiev in 2010.

A variety of instrumental music by Sergei Rachmaninoff will be performed during the tour: under the baton of maestro Gergiev the Mariinsky Orchestra will be presenting works from different periods of the composer’s life. These are to include both acclaimed works as well as other opuses that are rarely performed at concerts, among them the early symphonic poem The Rock (1893), the internationally adored Second and Third Piano Concerti and the composer’s final work – Symphonic Dances, which he commenced at the same time as the outbreak of WW II. The piano solo will be performed by internationally renowned Russian pianist and long-standing friend and colleague of the Mariinsky Orchestra Denis Matsuev. The Rachmaninoff programme will be performed in Montreal and Newark and at New York’s Carnegie Hall.  

On 11 October Valery Gergiev will be conducting an evening of Shostakovich’s music at Carnegie Hall. The programme for that concert is to include the First Piano Concerto (piano – Denis Matsuev; trumpet – Timur Martynov, Mariinsky Orchestra soloist and prize-winner at international competitions) and the grandiose Eighth Symphony – one of the composer’s most important works.