From 30 November to 4 December the Mariinsky Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev will be performing a series of concerts of Russian music at major venues in Taiwan and China.
At the Tainan Municipal Cultural Center on 30 November the Mariinsky Orchestra will be presenting a programme of symphony music masterpieces by Russian composers. The concert will feature suites from the ballet Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky and the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov as well as Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
On 1 and 2 December maestro Gergiev will be conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra in two concerts in the capital of Taiwan, where there will be performances at the National Theatre and Concert Hall in Taipei. The playbill for the first evening includes the overture from Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, the suite from the ballet The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Schéhérazade.
The programme for the second concert includes Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances and Sergei Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. Moreover, the same evening, Mariinsky Orchestra musicians will be joined by the internationally renowned Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who has previously worked with the Mariinsky Orchestra and Valery Gergiev on numerous occasions. He will be performing the solo in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 17.
One key event of the tour will be a marathon-festival of music by Prokofiev which the Mariinsky Orchestra will present at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. At three concerts on 3 and 4 December there will be performances of all of Prokofiev’s symphonies and piano concerti. At the evening performances the Mariinsky Theatre under maestro Gergiev together with pianists Grace Fong, Alexei Volodin and Sergei Babayan will perform the First, Second and Seventh Symphonies and the First and Third Piano Concerti (3 December), followed by the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies and the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concerti (4 December).
At the matinee concert on 4 December Valery Gergiev will be conducting the Russo-Chinese Youth Orchestra. The programme includes the Third and Fifth Symphonies and the Second Piano Concerto. The piano solo will be performed by young Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang.
The Russo-Chinese Youth Orchestra was founded as part of a youth exchange programme between Russia and China that runs in 2014 and 2015, one of the aims of which is to increase contacts between students of both countries. The first performance by this ensemble which includes fifty Russian and sixty-three Chinese musicians took place under the baton of Valery Gergiev in March this year at the new Mariinsky Theatre (Mariinsky-II).
The performance of all of Prokofiev’s piano concerti and symphonies will continue a series of music cycles by Russian composers to whom the Mariinsky Theatre and Valery Gergiev are introducing audiences at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing – a vast cultural complex in the Chinese capital that houses several stage venues. In December 2007 during festivities to mark the opening of the centre, in the main theatre auditorium the Mariinsky Theatre presented Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. Subsequent appearances were made at the centre’s large concert hall; in September 2011 there was a performance of a series of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, while in September 2012 came four symphonies and piano concerti by Shostakovich followed in December 2013 by a marathon-festival of music by Stravinsky. Earlier this year there was a joint-Russo-Chinese production of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, the premiere of which was conducted by Valery Gergiev in February 2014 at the Mariinsky-II and in March 2014 at the large auditorium of the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.
This unparalleled marathon of piano concerti and symphonies by Prokofiev adds to the series of concerts commemorating the great 20t century Russian composer by the Mariinsky Orchestra – recently similar concerts have been held in Stockholm, Vienna, Dortmund and Cardiff, while in mid-December Valery Gergiev will be presenting a festival of music by Prokofiev in Rome.
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