The new season at the Mariinsky Theatre: for the first time at seven venues at the Mariinsky Theatre, the Mariinsky-II and the Concert Hall there will be around one hundred performances and concerts each month. There will be cultural and educational programmes for children and young people on an unprecedented scale, as well as major Russian tours.
The new 232nd season opens on 26 September with the ballet Swan Lake at the historic 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 Hovhannes Ayvazyan. The season at the Concert Hall opens with a recital by Alexei Volodin on 27 September.
A year of Tchaikovsky. Marking 175 years since his birth
2015 will pass under the auspices of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, marking one hundred and seventy-five years since the birth of the great Russian composer for whom St Petersburg was his city in childhood, youth, glory and death. The Mariinsky Theatre’s repertoire includes all of the composer’s ballets, five of his operas and his symphony and chamber music. This date will be marked by performances and concerts. The anniversary year will also see the premiere of a new production of the opera The Queen of Spades (Stage Director – Alexei Stepanyuk) which will open the Stars of the White Nights festival. The XV International Tchaikovsky Competition, which runs from 23 June to 3 July 2015 in Moscow and St Petersburg, will be held at the Mariinsky Theatre among other host venues.
The potential of the Mariinsky-II will be truly brought to life: the four chamber halls, which began to function at full capacity last season, will be filled with rich events: there will be interactive sessions for children as part of the continuing children’s subscription series as well as new programmes targeted at audiences from age three to students; there will be appearances by musicians of the Mariinsky Orchestra and soloists of the Academy of Young Opera Singers in the Music Hour format; there will also be lectures and concerts by the city’s leading music historians. Much focus will be centred around music by 20th century and contemporary composers.
Season premieres
The first of the opera premieres of the new season is planned for 29 and 30 October 2014 – French stage director Alain Maratrat will be mounting a production of Gioachino Rossini’s opera Il barbiere di Siviglia. 31 January 2015 will see the premiere of 20th century Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti’s opera Assassinio nella cattedrale, to be directed by Vasily Barkhatov. The XXIII Stars of the White Nights music festival will open at the Mariinsky-II with the premiere of a new production of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades staged by Alexei Stepanyuk, while in June 2015 Claudia Solti will be staging Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La traviata. Anna Matison will be presenting a new stage version of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel. At the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre there will be a premiere of Vladimir Tarnopolsky’s musical tale A True Story about Cinderella for adults accompanied by children. Also there on 11 November there will be a concert performance of the Soviet composer Antonio Spadavecchia’s opera The Gadfly which in the late 1950s was staged by major opera houses throughout the Soviet Union – in Riga, Kharkov, Perm, Chelyabinsk and Kuibyshev. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Christmas Eve will take on new life at the Mariinsky-II.
Ballet premieres of the season promise audiences a broad range of choreographic genres, ranging from classical productions to modern dance; there will be a production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and Yuri Grigorovich’s The Stone Flower. The ballet playbill will see revivals of Reinhold Glière’s The Bronze Horseman and Scotch Symphony to music by Felix Mendelssohn with choreography by George Balanchine.
The new season promises to be rich in debuts: Olga Esina, who returns to the Mariinsky Ballet from the Wiener Staatsballett, will be dancing lead roles at the Mariinsky Theatre for the first time, among them Nikia in Minkus’ La Bayadère and the title role in Glazunov’s Raymonda, Kristina Shapran – a new Mariinsky Ballet soloist – will be appearing in lead roles in the ballets Giselle to music by Adolphe Adam, Le Parc to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Ludwig Minkus’ La Bayadère and Oxana Skorik will be performing as Aurora in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and the title role in Rodion Shchedrin’s ballet Anna Karenina. Vladimir Shklyarov will be making his debut as Ali-Batyr in Farid Yarullin’s Shurale, Timur Askerov and Andrei Yermakov will be performing the lead male role in Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, Xander Parish will be appearing as Prince Désiré in Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty and Kimin Kim will be performing the role of the Prince in Prokofiev’s Cinderella.
The ballet company will also be engaged in a key activity for the Mariinsky Theatre – the training of the next generation; there will be debuts by talented students of the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in repertoire productions alongside members of the company in addition to the academy’s traditional graduation performances.
Tradition and innovation
The Mariinsky Theatre is one of the few theatres in the world that presents different and often polar versions of one and the same work, as may be seen from the 2014-2015 playbill: Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov staged by Andrei Tarkovsky and Graham Vick, Yuri Temirkanov and Alexei Stepanyuk’s versions of Eugene Onegin and Andrei Konchalovsky and Graham Vick’s productions of War and Peace.
The playbill for the Concert Hall in the new season comprises mainly symphony and chamber music programmes as well as opera productions staged specifically for the Concert Hall such as Ariadne auf Naxos, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, L’elisir d’amore, Aida and May Night, while the number of choral programmes has increased significantly; alongside the popular Requiems of Giuseppe Verdi and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart the playbill for the Concert Hall features Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem which opens the choral playbill on 29 September, Johannes Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, George Frideric Handel’s The Messiah, Giacomo Puccini’s Messa, Sergei Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible and Rodion Shchedrin’s Boyarina Morozova, this new subscription will feature appearances by Russia’s largest children’s choruses. The Mariinsky Theatre will continue its important policy of inviting young and starting-out musicians – instrumentalists, conductors and entire ensembles.
Debuts at the Mariinsky
Performing at the Mariinsky Theatre is an honour for any brilliant musician. Hence the greater responsibility of “new names” at the Mariinsky – this “recommendation” can prove a defining point in the careers of young performers and offers them the opportunity to promote themselves before St Petersburg’s demanding audiences – even for established musicians who are appearing on the Mariinsky Theatre playbill for the first time, with the Concert hall hosting appearances by pianists Eric Schneider (5 October), Tae-Hyung Kim (8 October), Mikhail Yanovitsky (21 October), Dmitry Onishchenko (16 November) and Xavier Phillips (23 November), the Tchiki Duo percussion (marimba) duet (10 October), violinists Leticia Moreno (11 October)and Vadim Gluzman (26 November) and clarinettist Igor Fedorov (22 October).
Several debuts will take place during the Organ Festival with concerts featuring Gunther Rost, David Briggs and Maxime Patel.
Education projects at the Mariinsky Theatre:
The new project Art Schools Visiting the Mariinsky Theatre is targeted towards young musicians. The theatre will be offering St Petersburg’s music schools and art schools the opportunity to run review-concerts in the chamber venues of the Mariinsky-II. The music schools will form the programme of these concerts independently and depending on the participants’ preferences. The first concerts are scheduled for November.
Yet another new project comes with the series of free weekly chamber concerts Open Wednesdays at the Mariinsky, which will allow the public to become more familiar with the orchestra’s musicians and young instrumentalists in chamber format at the various halls of the Mariinsky-II; this series starts in October. Every Wednesday musicians of the Mariinsky Orchestra and guest performers will offer audiences programmes of works from the international classical repertoire from eras ranging from Bach to Shchedrin and including rarely performed music by such composers as André Jolivet, Eugène Ysaÿe and Bohuslav Martinů. Each concert can be heard just once – neither the same musicians nor the same programme will be repeated.
At the chamber venues of the Mariinsky-II we continue our series of interactive sessions for young and school-age children (3-8 years), which have proved tremendously popular – Piccolo at the Mariinsky and Music Told in Tales of Sand.
The cultural-educative programme The Soul of St Petersburg – the Mariinsky Theatre features a brief introductory lecture to the basic concepts of musical theatre, an excursion of the public areas of the Mariinsky-II and a theatrical divertissement with the Mariinsky Academy of Young Opera Singers. This season guests include school-pupils from over twenty Russian regions, from the Kamchatka and Magadan Regions to Ingushetia and Adygea, who will be visiting the city as part of the school tourism project My Russia: Peter’s City, run by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
We continue the series of lectures and concerts as part of the interactive sessions Bead-Play: Inside Music and beyond Its Confines for middle-school pupils given by the best music and theatre historians of St Petersburg. These lectures and concerts feature soloists of the Mariinsky Theatre and Orchestra.
Each day of the new season the Mariinsky Theatre will be admitting over two hundred year-10 pupils from St Petersburg schools as part of the project A Theatre Lesson at the Mariinsky. Teenagers will discover the backstage premises of the Mariinsky-II and undertake a team task – creating their own design for a theatre production and attending an opera or a ballet at one of the theatre’s three stage venues. This project, unique in terms of scale, inclusion and intensiveness of content, was inaugurated by the theatre last season with the active support of the St Petersburg City Government and received lofty praise from teachers and participating school-pupils.
This season the series of master-classes Valery Gergiev’s Arts Centres given by leading members of the orchestra and chorus masters of the Mariinsky Theatre as well as teachers of the faculty of arts of the St Petersburg State University will run from 12 to 19 October. Pupils from music schools and middle and upper special academic institutions that focus on professional musical or arts education are invited to take part in the lessons. After the master-classes there will be concerts, exhibitions and a prize-giving ceremony for the participants.
Festivals in the new season
Organ Festival
24 – 30 October 2014
The International Organ Festival is being run for the second time. Over the course of five days the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre will become a focal point for culture in St Petersburg – there will be debuts at the Concert Hall by: Gunther Rost (24 October), a prize-winner at more than ten organ competitions, a recipient of Bavaria’s State award “For Achievements in the Arts” and a professor of organ and improvisation at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz (Austria); David Briggs (28 October), the staff organist of Gloucester Cathedral and a professor of the British Royal Academy of Music; Maxime Patel (26 October), an organist known both in Europe and beyond. Festival participants at the Concert Hall also include Lada Labzina (25 October), an Honoured Artist of the Republic of Tatarstan, senior lecturer in organ and harpsichord at the Kazan State Zhiganov Conservatoire and Art Director of the State Bolshoi Saydashev Concert Hall in Kazan, and organist and improviser Thierry Escaich (30 October) – a world-famous composer (having created over one hundred opuses), teacher and recipient of numerous music awards.
The Mariinsky Piano Festival
23 – 28 December 2014 and 5 – 11 April 2015
The next series of the international festival presents both young and established pianists, each with his or her own inimitable style. This season the festival will be held at several venues – the Concert Hall, the main stage and the concert venues of the Mariinsky-II.
The Maslenitsa festival
16 - 22 February 2015
An annual festival that runs during Shrovetide. The Mariinsky Theatre returns to the glorious tradition of Shrovetide festivities, alternating public celebrations with humorous performances; audiences will have the opportunity to see vivid opera and ballet productions, generally based on fairy-tales.
The Mariinsky international ballet festival
12 – 22 March 2015
The traditional Mariinsky international ballet festival is taking place for the fifteenth time. Each year the festival presents productions from the classical repertoire, premieres and new projects featuring stars of the Mariinsky Ballet and outstanding guest dancers. The festival will see the continuation of the project The Young Choreographers’ Workshop – a programme that gives young ballet masters the opportunity to demonstrate their skills to an audience. As part of the Workshop there will be a premiere of a full-evening ballet by young choreographer Anton Pimonov, two of whose ballets are already in the company’s repertoire.
The Stars of the White Nights festival – one of the world’s largest international music forums – will take place in June-July 2015 at three venues including the possibilities of the Mariinsky-II’s chamber venues. The festival is currently considered one of the ten best festivals in the world. Over the course of twenty-two years, the Stars of the White Nights festival has expanded from ten days to sixty-five.
From 2014 the festival will be held at three main venues (the Mariinsky Theatre, the Mariinsky-II and the Concert Hall) as well as the four chamber halls of the new theatre.
Each year the festival programme comprises the finest operas and ballets on the theatre’s repertoire as well as premieres, tremendous symphony concerts and masterpieces of chamber music. The galaxy of dazzling Mariinsky Theatre performers and international guest stars will be augmented by talented young performers in the festival programme.
Mariinsky Theatre Festivals in Russia
The Moscow Easter Festival
12 April – 9 May 2015
The fourteenth season of the Moscow Easter Festival will run from 12 April to 9 May 2015 and will commemorate two auspicious dates – the 70th anniversary of Victory Day in WW-II and the Great Patriotic War as well as the 175th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The Mstislav Rostropovich Music Festival
The Mstislav Rostropovich Music Festival is being run for the seventh time this year. The Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will be performing at the Samara Opera and Ballet Theatre in early December. The festival will feature a Russian tour by the Mariinsky Theatre and will culminate in a “pre-New Year” musical tribute to Moscow.
Mariinsky Theatre tours in the 2014-2015 season
The Mariinsky Ballet: in October the Mariinsky Ballet will be appearing at the Ravenna Festival. At the Teatro Alighieri the Mariinsky Ballet will present its classical repertoire: on 2, 3 and 7 October there will be Swan Lake; on 4 and 8 October there will be the one-act ballets Chopiniana and Apollo as well as Rubies from George Balanchine’s ballet Jewels. On 5 and 6 October the company will give three performances of the ballet Giselle. The arrival of the Mariinsky dancers will be heralded by 3D performances of the ballets Swan Lake and Giselle, filmed at the Mariinsky Theatre. In November the ballet company will perform Le Corsaire in Rio de Janeiro and subsequently in São Paulo. In December in Baden-Baden there will be performances of Raymonda, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. Late January and early February will see the start of a tour by the ballet company to Washington.
In October the Mariinsky Opera will be performing in Astana, where it will present two parts of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen – Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. In November in Birmingham Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen will be performed in full. On 2 November in Cardiff in Wales Mariinsky Theatre soloists and the Chorus and Orchestra will perform Sergei Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery, while on 3-5 November at the Barbican in London there will be performances of Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Rodion Shchedrin’s The Lefthander and Valery Gavrilin’s The Chimes.
Under Valery Gergiev the Mariinsky Orchestra opens the season with Russian tours: On 5 October there will be two concerts at the Tomsk Philharmonic, while on 6 and 7 October there will be three concerts in Vladivostok at the new Primorsky Opera and Ballet Theatre. The musicians will subsequently appear in Khabarovsk (19 October)and Kemerovo (20 October). The ensemble then departs for Japan, marking the first foreign tour of the season. The programme of the tour focusses on works by Stravinsky, Shchedrin, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky as well as Mahler, Brahms and Strauss. In late October the Mariinsky Orchestra will be appearing in Frankfurt together with violinist Nicola Benedetti. There will be a monograph series of concerts of works by Sergei Prokofiev in Austria and Germany: in Vienna (27, 28 October)there will be performances of his First and Second Symphonies and all of his piano concerti with soloists Behzod Abduraimov, Alexei Volodin, Sergei Babayan and Denis Kozhukhin; in Dortmund (31 October and 1 November) there will be performances of all of the composer’s piano concerti, the opera Betrothal in a Monastery with the theatre’s soloists and chorus and music for the ballet Cinderella as well as the oratorio Ivan the Terrible. On 9 December in Turin the orchestra will perform Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. On 10-12 December in Rome the orchestra will present a marathon of works by Sergei Prokofiev: all of his symphonies and Violin Concerto No 2 with soloist Leonidas Kavakos. There will be an extensive tour of the USA by the orchestra from 24 January to 6 February, taking the musicians to Troy, Morristown, Chapel Hill, Daytona Beach, Naples and Miami.
In summer, in accordance with tradition the Mariinsky Orchestra will be performing at the Mikkeli Festival at the Baltic Sea Festival.
Tours at the Mariinsky Theatre
On 14-15 October the Peking Opera will be performing at the historic Mariinsky Theatre for the first time; one of China’s oldest and most acclaimed theatres, it will be performing the traditional Legend of the White Snake and Lady Mu Guiying Takes Command.
Throughout the season the Concert Hall will host performances by such famed ensembles as the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra (3 October), the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne (3 November), the Philadelphia Virtuosi chamber orchestra (8 November), the Venice Baroque Orchestra (5 December) and the Musicians of Rome chamber orchestra.
One of the theatre’s most important activities is inviting symphony orchestras from cities throughout Russia to perform at the Concert Hall – this season at the Mariinsky Theatre there will be concerts by the Symphony Orchestra and the State Primorsky Opera and Ballet Theatre as well as the State Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of Tatarstan.
Film production at the Mariinsky Theatre
During the 2014-15 season there will be a series of film screenings recorded in the 2013-14 season of Ludwig Minkus’ ballet La Bayadère with classical choreography by Marius Petipa and Sergei Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace staged by Graham Vick. During the Stars of the White Nights festival there will be live broadcasts of works to music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky as well as a premiere of the opera The Queen of Spades and the ballet The Sleeping Beauty.
The Mariinsky Theatre – a historic guardian of the values of russian music and theatre art
The Mariinsky Theatre is a unique artistic and historic phenomenon in Russian and world music. It has presented the world with amazing artists in performances and concert series at three venues. But, moreover, the Mariinsky Theatre is also a historic guardian of the values of Russian music and theatre art with its unique and rich archive.
To mark the anniversary of Modest Musorgsky’s birth the theatre has prepared an exhibition revealing documents and interesting facts concerning the first ever production of the composer’s opera Boris Godunov at the Mariinsky Theatre. The original manuscript and the composer’s personal request to the theatre’s board to accept the work to be staged as a production will all be available to view at an exhibition that runs for the first weeks of the new season.
For the coming year a similar exhibition is planned featuring documents and manuscripts of Pyotr Tchaikovsky to mark one hundred and seventy-five years since the composer’s birth.
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