Valery Gergiev to Tour Mexico and the U. S.

April 1 will see Valery Gergiev conducting the Esperanza Azteca Youth Symphony Orchestra and Choir at a concert marking the 20^th anniversary of the Fundación Azteca, Mexico. This public event will unfold at the open stage of the Mexico’s National Art Centre.

The programme includes the Overture to Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prince Gremin’s aria ‘All age obeys the call of love’ from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor, and fragments of the scenic cantata Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. The event will feature Lorenz Nasturica-Herschcowici (violin) as a soloist, as well as singers Dmitry Grigoriev (bass) and Alexander Mikhailov (baritone), scholarship holders of the Atkins Young Artists Programme, an international project running in the Mariinsky theatre.
Valery Gergiev previously met Esperanza Azteca in March 2016, when he gave a master class for young Mexican musicians in the city of Puebla, as part the Mariinsky Orchestra tour in Latin America.

Esperanza Azteca is a social project aimed at supporting, through music, children aged 5 to 17 from disadvantaged families and communities. This programme, launched by the Fundación Azteca in 2009, now involves 86 symphonic and choral ensembles, comprising over 17 thousand young musicians.

After that, Valery Gergiev will move to the U. S. for a tour with the Munich Philharmonic starting on April 2. The first concert will be held in Newark, where the New Jersey Centre of the Performing Arts will feature Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Juan, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto D Dur (for the left hand), and Beethoven’s Third Symphony. On April 3 and 5, the Munich Philharmonic and Valery Gergiev will appear at Carnegie-Hall (New York City), one of the world’s most prestigious venues. On the first evening, the musicians will perform Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and Maurice Ravel’s Waltz and Piano concerto in G, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as a soloist. On April 5, for the final concert of the tour, the musicians will perform the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Debussy and Fourth Symphonies by both Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler.