The Mariinsky in Beijing

On 7 and 8 December the musicians of the Mariinsky Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev will be visiting Beijing where there will be an unprecedented marathon festival of the music of Igor Stravinsky. Over the course of these two days the Mariinsky Orchestra will give three performances featuring ten different works by Stravinsky; this is the first time in Chinese history that Stravinsky’s music is being so universally presented. In 2010 Valery Gergiev ran a similar project in the USA, where he organised and held the three-week Russian Stravinsky festival, one of the largest ever festivals in the history of the New York Philharmonic to be dedicated to one specific composer.

The concert for 7 December includes the orchestral fantasia Fireworks, music from the ballets Jeu de cartes and The Firebird and Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. In the Capriccio the solo is to be performed by internationally acclaimed pianist Alexander “Lexo” Toradze, with whom the Mariinsky Orchestra has had a long and fruitful partnership.

The programme for the matinee concert on 8 December includes the Concerto for Two Pianos (soloists – Dmitri Levkovich and Marina Radiushina) and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (soloist – Sergei Babayan) as well as the “Russian choreographic scenes for soloists, chorus, four pianos and percussion” Les Noces. The vocal roles will be sung by lead Mariinsky Opera singers Irina Vasilieva, Olga Savova, Alexander Timchenko and Ilya Bannik while the piano solos will be performed by Sergei Babayan, Dmitri Levkovich, Marina Radiushina and Andrius Zlabys.

The main event of the evening concert will be a work that has long been considered a “calling-card” of the Mariinsky Orchestra – Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, the one hundredth anniversary of the premiere of which has been widely celebrated this year in the music world. The Mariinsky Orchestra will be presenting the symphony version of this revolutionary 20^th century score together with music from the ballet Pétrouchka and the  Le Roi des étoiles cantata for male chorus and orchestra.
All concerts will take place at the National Centre for the Performing Arts.