Results of the season in figures:
• 50 weeks was the length of the 231st season over the course of 2013-14
• 3 venues: the Mariinsky Theatre, the Mariinsky-II and the Concert Hall. 4 chamber venues at the Mariinsky-II
• 1036 concerts and ballet and opera performances as well as events in chamber venues at the Mariinsky-II
• 9 premieres: 5 operas and 4 ballets, one of which was an evening of four one-act ballets by Hans van Manen
• 6 festivals in St Petersburg plus the XIII Moscow Easter Festival, taking in 56 Russian towns and cities from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok
• 18230 school pupils from 25 Russian regions, including the Far East, attended the Mariinsky Theatre as part of the programme The Mariinsky Theatre – the Soul of St Petersburg
• 13079 year-ten pupils from St Petersburg schools took part in the educational project A Theatre Lesson at the Mariinsky
Premieres of the 231st season. The first operatic premiere of the outgoing season was a premiere of a new stage version of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello (Stage Director – Vasily Barkhatov). At the very end of December 2013 came a premiere of Verdi’s opera Il trovatore (Stage Director – Pierre Luigi Pizzi) in which the lead female roles were sung by Anna Netrebko and Ekaterina Semenchuk. Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was a co-production with the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing (Stage Director – Alexei Stepanyuk), and following the St Petersburg premiere the production was staged in Beijing with two casts – Russian and Chinese – while during the Stars of the White Nights festival soloists of the Beijing Opera took part in a performance at the Mariinsky-II. A production of Hector Berlioz’ grandiose operatic duologue Les Troyens was mounted by stage director and production designer Yannis Kokkos. The influence of Les Troyens was felt almost throughout the entire 231st season – in October there was a concert performance of the opera in Vienna, in May it was staged at the Mariinsky-II and, in late August, the Mariinsky Theatre will be presenting this production under the baton of Valery Gergiev at the acclaimed Edinburgh International Festival. Sergei Prokofiev’s operatic epic War and Peace was staged by director Graham Vick and drew a huge response from critics and the public. This production has been seen by hundreds of thousands in towns and cities throughout Europe thanks to live broadcasts of a performance to cinemas.
Ballet premieres of the season: Infra with choreography by Wayne McGregor; the full-length ballet Sylvia by Frederick Ashton, staged during the MARIINSKY international ballet festival; his one-act romantic ballet Marguerite and Armand, premiered during the XXII Stars of the White Nights festival, was also performed in the choreographer’s native land – in the UK during a tour by the Mariinsky Ballet to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; and, lastly, another premiere at the Stars – an evening of four one-act ballets by Hans van Manen, coached in St Petersburg by the choreographer himself.
Significant events of the season – a concert featuring the thousand-member Children’s Chorus of Russia: on 7 January at the Mariinsky-II children from all eighty-three Russian regions comprising the Children’s Chorus of Russia performed with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev. This event was broadcast throughout Russia by Kultura TV. In February the maestro conducted the chorus at the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympic Games. The establishment of the Children’s Chorus of Russia is a major project of the All-Russian Choral Society which was established on the initiative of Valery Gergiev. This action by the maestro met with a hearty response in many towns throughout Russia, with numerous children’s choruses being set up today, several of which have already performed with the Mariinsky Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev at concerts during the XIII Moscow Easter Festival.
Other no less significant events included a major concert by the Russo-Chinese Youth Orchestra under the baton of maestro Gergiev which opened a programme of years of youth exchange between China and Russia; a live broadcast to major European cinemas of one of the finest ballets in the theatre’s classical repertoire – Ludwig Minkus’ ballet La Bayadère with Viktoria Tereshkina and Vladimir Shklyarov in the lead roles; and the premiere of a new production of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace in collaboration with Telmondis and More2Screen.
Festivals. The Mariinsky Theatre ran the I Organ Festival at the Concert Hall, featuring appearances by the greatest organists from Europe. The already traditional Mariinsky Theatre festivals were held – two rounds of the International Piano Festival at the Mariinsky-II and the Concert Hall, the first featuring an audience vote for the first time as well as the presentation of an “audience favourite” award to young pianist Behzod Abduraimov; the Maslenitsa festival; the MARIINSKY ballet festival, which this year ran the second Creative Workshop of Young Choreographers that allows the results of young choreographers’ artistic searches to be presented to audiences and new names to be discovered; and, finally, the XXII Stars of the White Nights international festival. The festival ran at all three of the theatre’s buildings – the historic theatre, the Mariinsky-II and the Concert Hall. For the first time, the programme featured concerts and lectures at the chamber venues of the Mariinsky-II – the Stravinsky Foyer, Shchedrin Hall, the Prokofiev Hall and the Musorgsky Hall. During this major music festival lasting sixty-five days – from 28 May to 31 July – there were over two hundred opera and ballet performances, eighty chamber and symphony music concerts featuring guest artists and soloists of the Mariinsky Opera, Ballet, Chorus and Orchestra. In advance of the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition, to be held in 2015, the festival playbill listed some of the finest musicians in the world, among them Denis Matsuev, Alexei Volodin, Christian Blackshaw, Daniil Trifonov, Boris Berezovsky, Rudolf Buchbinder, Mario Brunello, David Geringas, Janine Jansen, Leonidas Kavakos, Behzod Abduraimov and, of course, such stars of the Mariinsky Opera as Olga Borodina, Yevgeny Nikitin, Alexei Markov, Mikhail Petrenko, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Sergei Semishkur and Sergei Skorokhodov in addition to guest soloists including Ferruccio Furlanetto, Ekaterina Gubanova, Liudmyla Monastyrska, Marcelo Álvarez, Oksana Dyka, Maria Agresta, Daniela Barcellona, Fabio Sartori, Michele Pertusi, Maria Guleghina and Anita Rachvelishvili among others.
Yet another major project – the XIII Moscow Easter Festival – this year covered the whole of Russia, with programmes of symphony, choral, chamber and bell-ringing music performed in fifty-six towns and cities. The Mariinsky Orchestra, Brass Ensemble and Stradivarius Ensemble under Valery Gergiev and the theatre’s Wind Quintet performed over twenty-six days in twenty-six towns from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok and from Volgograd to Severomorsk. The regional programmes featured appearances by world-renowned performers including Pinchas Zukerman, Nelson Freire, Denis Matsuev, Daniil Trifonov and Amanda Forsythe in addition to younger soloists who represent the future of Russian music.
There were also several monograph festivals – one marking a century since the birth of Benjamin Britten, a second marking one hundred and seventy-five years since the birth of Modest Musorgsky and yet another commemorating two centuries since the birth of Giuseppe Verdi.
Over the course of the season the chamber venues of the Mariinsky-II began to function, each of them named after an outstanding Russian composer – Musorgsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shchedrin. These halls hosted the programme Music Hour, a series of concerts organised by the Academy of Young Opera Singers and lectures – a total of 103 events.
The Mariinsky theatre has become a major cultural and educational centre. In the 231st theatre season we began a series of educational programmes for children and young people from three to student age. Together with the children’s reading centre Piccolo the Mariinsky Theatre presented a series of chamber concerts and lessons entitled Musical Instruments in the Magical Land of Piccolo for children between the ages of three and six. For the youngest school pupils there was a series of interactive fairy-tale concerts and lessons entitled Music Told in Tales of Sand. For young pupils we continued the Young Theatre Goers’ Academy subscription which lasts two years. Pupils at middle school had the opportunity to attend the series of lectures and concerts Bead-Play: Inside Music and beyond Its Confines given by famous music historians, theatre historians and composers from St Petersburg. As part of the federally supported culture and education programme The Mariinsky Theatre – the Soul of St Petersburg the theatre was visited by 18230 pupils from twenty-five Russian regions including the Far East. A Theatre Lesson at the Mariinsky is a project, unique in terms of its scale, which was organised by the theatre with support from the City Government of St Petersburg and is targeted at year-ten pupils at all city and suburban schools; between January and May the project involved 13079 senior pupils. The theatre has begun to work actively with adult audiences, offering lecture programmes in the form of A Sunday Foreword – weekly lectures prior to the start of a performance or a concert at the Mariinsky-II that focus on adult musicians and performers of the Mariinsky Theatre.
Tours. Over the course of the 2013-14 season the Mariinsky Opera, Ballet, Chorus and Orchestra toured to twenty countries, with the theatre’s performances being seen by audiences in some forty towns outside Russia and fifty-six towns in Russia. An extremely important tour for the opera company included a performance of Berlioz’ Les Troyens at the Edinburgh Festival in late August, while the most important tour for the ballet company took them to London for a three-week season including twenty-one performances.
This season the Mariinsky label celebrated five years since its launch, releasing an anniversary compilation of highlights from its best recordings. The founding date of the label is considered to be the day the first audio recording went on sale – Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose performed by Mariinsky Opera soloists and the Chorus and Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev. The last five years have seen the release of twenty-five discs (twenty audio and five video recordings). Recordings are issued in the contemporary formats SACD (audio) and DVD and Blu-ray (video) and include booklets containing information about the works and their performers. All audio recordings are also available in digital format from the iTunes music shop. Since it was established five years ago the Mariinsky label has won numerous prestigious awards and lofty praise from respected critics and music publications. This season the label released two discs of symphonies by Dmitry Shostakovich – the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth. There are two discs with Denis Matsuev – Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s First and Second Piano Concerti as well as Sergei Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto and Fifth Symphony. Wagner’s Ring cycle continues – an audio recording of Das Rheingold has been released. Available on DVD in Blu-ray format is Richard Strauss’ opera Die Frau ohne Schatten with Mlada Khudoley as the Empress and Avgust Amonov as the Emperor along with Edem Umerov (Barak) and Olga Sergeyeva (Barak’s Wife). This year a recording of Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler won an International Classical Music Award, a major classical music prize. A disc of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s First and Second Piano Concerti, released in February this year, was named “Recording of the Month” by Great Britain’s respected Gramophone magazine. A recording of works by Prokofiev (Piano Concerto No 3 and Symphony No 5) was also named “Disc of the Month” by the UK music portal Classical CD Choice. The last release of the current season – a recording of Shostakovich’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies performed by the Mariinsky Orchestra under maestro Gergiev – received the prestigious Choc du mois award from Classica magazine.
The 2014-15 season opens on 26 September with a performance of the ballet Swan Lake at the Mariinsky Theatre and Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il trovatore at the Mariinsky-II with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra and a stellar cast including Tatiana Serjan, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Alexei Markov and Hovannes Ayvazyan. The season at the Concert Hall opens with a recital by Alexei Volodin on 27 September. On 29 September there will be a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem marking one century since the start of World War I. The soloists are Oksana Dyka, Alexander Timchenko and Vladislav Sulimsky along with the Mariinsky Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev.
| user_name | | Exit |
