On 2 August The Nutcracker at the historic Mariinsky Theatre and Eugene Onegin at the Mariinsky-II brought the season to a close. The new 2015-2016 season opens on 25 September at all three venues.
The main events of the 232nd season may be seen in the final press for this season
Results in figures:
• The season lasted forty-five weeks.
• Performances and concerts took place at seven venues: at the historic Mariinsky Theatre, the Concert Hall, the Mariinsky II and its four chamber music halls.
• There was a total of one thousand, two hundred and fifty-nine performances and concerts, averaging four events per day.
• There were five opera premieres and eleven ballet premieres.
• The theatre ran five festivals in St Petersburg, as well as the grandiose XIV Moscow Easter Festival, including concerts in twenty-seven Russian cities as well as Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.
• Our intensive educational work with children has continued; more than twenty thousand year-ten pupils from St Petersburg took part in the interactive project A Theatre Lesson at the Mariinsky, while twelve and a half thousand school pupils from Russia’s regions visited the theatre as part of the programme The Mariinsky Theatre – the Soul of St Petersburg (the Ministry of Culture’s project My Russia: Peter’s City).
Premieres of the 232nd season
• Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia staged by Alain Maratrat.
• Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel (Anna Matison’s debut as a director).
• El Juez – Die Verlorenen Kinder, an opera by the contemporary Austrian composer Christian Kolonvits, the lead role in which was performed by the internationally acclaimed tenor José Carreras.
• Vladimir Tarnopolsky’s musical tale The True Story of Cinderella entered the theatre’s repertoire in March 2015.
• The Stars of the White Nights festival saw new productions of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (directed by Alexei Stepanyuk) and Verdi’s La traviata (directed by Claudia Solti). Following the premiere, the new Queen of Spades was also performed at the summer music festival in Baden-Baden.
• There was the first performance in concert in Russia of Luigi Dallapiccola’s one-act opera Il prigioniero.
• There were also concert performances of the world premieres of operas by contemporary Russian composers – The Damned Apostle by Pyotr Gekker and Bela by Leonid Klinichev.
• The Young Choreographers’ Creative Workshop project has opened up the path for one-act ballets by Maxim Petrov, Ilya Zhivoi, Yuri Smekalov, Vladimir Varnava, Xenia Zvereva and Maxim Sevagin. Three of them – Petrov’s Ballet No 2, Varnava’s Clay and Zvereva’s Second I – are now in the theatre’s repertoire.
• Together with Anna Matison, Anton Pimonov presented the ballet diptych Bambi. In the Jungle to music by Alexander Lokshin and Andrei Golovin.
• The final ballet production of the season was Le Divertissement du Roi, a neoclassical fantasy by Maxim Petrov on baroque themes. It was created specially for Principal Dancer Igor Kolb and was presented at the ballet evening Knights of Dance.
In June and July the theatre welcomed participants of the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition. The Musorgsky Hall in the Mariinsky II and the Concert Hall hosted the vocalists’ competition, while the main stage of the Mariinsky II saw the final gala concert of prize-winners. That same evening, the Co-Chair of the competition’s Organisational Committee Valery Gergiev announced the winner of the Grand Prix – the Mongolian baritone Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar. The jury members – the outstanding musicians Barry Douglas, Denis Matsuev, Lynn Harrell, Leonidas Kavakos, Yuri Bashmet, James Ehnes, Olga Borodina, Mikhail Petrenko and Mikhail Kazakov – all gave recitals in June at the Mariinsky’s various venues.
Tours at the Mariinsky Theatre
• The Beijing Opera
• The Astana Ballet
• The Ballet Company of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre staged one-act ballets by Jiří Kylián as part of the project The Golden Mask Festival in St Petersburg
• The Turku Philharmonic Orchestra
• The Venice Baroque Orchestra
• The Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne
• The Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra
• The Virtuosi di Roma ensemble
• The Wiener Philharmoniker under Riccardo Muti
• The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi
Diana Vishneva celebrated twenty years of work with the Mariinsky Ballet with an artistic soirée, which included Hans van Manen’s ballet • The Old Man and Me• and the finale of John Cranko’s ballet Onegin.
To mark one hundred and seventy-five years since the birth of Tchaikovsky the theatre presented every ballet and opera by the composer in the Mariinsky’s current repertoire, as well as preparing an exhibition of costumes from historic productions, archive documents and decoded manuscripts of Tchaikovsky from the theatre’s collection. On the eve of the composer’s birthday, on 6 May at the Mariinsky II there was an Evening of Tchaikovsky, which attracted many new patrons.
Festivals
• The II Organ Festival (October) presented the internationally acclaimed musicians Thierry Escaich, David Briggs, Maxime Patel, Lada Ladzina and Gunther Rost.
• The International Piano Festival (December and April). This season’s participants included Mira Yevtich, Boris Berezovsky, Daniil Trifonov, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Yeol Eum Son, Boris Petrushansky and Alexei Volodin among others.
• The XV ballet festival MARIINSKY (March) was held in collaboration with the Opéra de Paris. Key events included the premieres of the ballets Bambi and In the Jungle, Viktoria Tereshkina’s artistic soirée and the staging of works as part of the Young Choreographers’ Creative Workshop.
• Six orchestras from St Petersburg’s music institutions took part in the I Festival of Children’s and Youth Orchestras (April).
• The XIV Moscow Easter Festival, which ran from 12 April to 9 May, was dedicated this year to the seventieth anniversary of victory in World War II and the anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s birth.
• The XXIII Stars of the White Nights music festival was held under the aegis of Tchaikovsky. The playbill of the festival included several monograph programmes; all of Brahms’ symphonies were performed by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi, the Viennese pianist Rudolf Buchbinder appeared as both soloist and conductor with nine concerti by Mozart and the Atrium quartet performed Beethoven’s Russian quartets. The Mariinsky Orchestra was accompanied onstage by such world-renowned conductors as Christoph Eschenbach, Emmanuel Villaume, Vladimir Ashkenazy and John Axelrod.
The Mariinsky Theatre’s various venues saw performances by such internationally acclaimed singers as Ferruccio Furlanetto, Olga Borodina, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Rafał Siwek, Vitaly Kovalev, Mikhail Kazakov, Albina Shagimuratova, Maria Guleghina, Tatiana Serjan, Gevorg Akopian, Asmik Grigorian, Alexei Markov, Ildar Abdrazakov, Yevgeny Nikitin and Mikhail Petrenko.
The festival saw appearances by the outstanding violinists Pinchas Zukerman, Leonidas Kavakos, Kristóf Baráti, Ilya Gringolts and James Ehnes and the pianists Daniil Trifonov, Alexei Volodin, Christian Blackshaw, Rudolf Buchbinder and Denis Matsuev.
The performance by French pianist Lucas Debargue, a prize-winner at the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition, caused a veritable furore.
One of the most important activities of the Mariinsky Theatre is its cultural and educational projects
This season saw the organisation of the free weekly concert series Open Wednesday at the Mariinsky (a total of thirty-three concerts). These were held in the Stravinsky Foyer and gave the opportunity to more than five thousand music-lovers to get to know members of the Mariinsky Orchestra up-close (some one hundred and fifty musicians of the orchestra took part in the concerts).
Part of the project involved performances by teachers and students from the city’s music and arts schools – Arts Schools Visiting the Mariinsky Theatre. Over the course of the 2014–2015 season the chamber venues of the Mariinsky II hosted twenty “children’s” concerts.
Over four hundred young musicians demonstrated their skills.
Throughout the season the chamber venues of the Mariinsky II were in active use. The Musorgsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shchedrin Halls hosted Music Hours, series of concerts organised by the Academy of Young Opera Singers and lectures, in all totalling some four hundred events.
The Young Theatre-Goers’ Academy also continued its subscriptions with the programme for older school pupils Playing with Beads and the Piccolo series of lectures held in conjunction with the Mariinsky Theatre featuring programmes for children from three years to teenagers.
The theatre has worked actively with its adult patrons too, offering a series of lecture programmes in the form of weekly discussions preceding a performance or concert at the Mariinsky II entitled Sunday Foreword as well as lectures focussing on outstanding performers and musicians of the Mariinsky Theatre.
Mariinsky Theatre tours
In the 2014-2015 season the Mariinsky Theatre (ballet company, opera company, orchestra and chorus) toured to sixteen countries, visiting forty-nine cities abroad and twenty-eight within Russia. Of incredible significance proved the appearances in Russian towns and cities during the Easter Festival and tours to Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, as well as a tour to the USA which saw a performance of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera The Enchanted Wanderer, a major tour by the orchestra to Japan and performances in China during which Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra opened the Prokofiev Festival in Beijing, which saw performances of all of the composer’s symphonies and piano concerti. In Great Britain there were performances of the opera Betrothal in a Monastery and Boris Godunov, the European premiere of Shchedrin’s opera The Lefthander and a performance of Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen.
The main ballet tours included appearances in South and North America, featuring performances of the repertoire’s finest productions, such as Swan Lake, Le Corsaire, Cinderella, Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps and ballets by Michel Fokine.
This season the Mariinsky label has produced five discs – Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet on DVD with Diana Vishneva and Vladimir Shklyarov, Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Songs and Dances of Death with Ferruccio Furlanetto, Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto with soloist Denis Matsuev, Shchedrin’s opera The Lefthander and Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony and First Violin Concerto with soloist Leonidas Kavakos. The fifth disc is ready to be released – Prokofiev’s Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and the Fifth Piano Concerto performed by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, the solo performed by Sergei Babayan.
The label’s releases are produced in the contemporary formats SACD (audio), DVD and Blu-ray (video); they are accompanied by booklets containing information about the works and the performers. All audio recordings are also available in digital format from iTunes.
The 2015-2016 season opens on 25 September at all three venues: at the Mariinsky II there will be a performance of last season’s premiere of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades conducted by Valery Gergiev. Ballets by Michel Fokine, a unique early 20th century project comprising Chopiniana, Le Spectre de la rose, The Dying Swan and Schéhérazade, comprise the first ballet evening of the new season. A concert by pianist Dmitry Masleyev, recipient of the 1st prize at the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition, opens the series of concerts by prize-winners of this prestigious music contest.
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