As part of the Stars of the White Nights festival, on June 10 and June 13, on two rare occasions, Leon Botstein will conduct the Mariinsky Orchestra. Botstein is Principal Conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the President of the Bard College (a private liberal arts college in the state of New York).
June 10 will see the concert In the Lead-Up to Leonard Bernstein’s 100th Anniversary at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre. The anniversary of Leonard Bernstein, one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, who was also a pianist, lecturer, and talented composer, will be widely celebrated all over the world in 2018.
The composer’s own music – the fragments from the operetta Candide, based on Voltaire’s novella Candide, ou l'Optimisme – along with the works of Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland, whose music was so beloved by Bernstein, as well as the works of Ludwig van Beethoven will be performed at the special concert. Anastasia Kalagina (soprano) and Olga Pudova (soprano) will sing the vocal parts.
June 13 will see the performance of Sergei Taneyev’s only opera, Oresteia (concert performance), at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre. The opera has now come full circle and returns to the Mariinsky Theatre, where it had its world premiere. The performers includes the soloists of the Mariinsky Opera, the ensemble of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Opera Singers, and the Mariinsky Orchestra under the baton of Leon Botstein. Anna Kiknadze (Clytemnestra), Dmitry Voropaev (Orestes), and Pavel Shmulevich (Agamemnon) will perform the main roles.
Stage history of Sergei Taneyev’s musical trilogy is hardly eventful, even 100 years after its premiere in 1895. Oresteia was withdrawn from the Mariinsky Theatre repertoire after only eight performances. This was mostly due to the difficult relationships between the uncompromising author and the no less demanding conductor Eduard Nápravník, who insisted on making enormous cuts. The production returned to the repertoire only after the composer’s death in 1915, but did not enjoy great success with wider audiences. Since then Oresteia has been staged only a few times: in Moscow (1917), Minsk (1963), Saratov (2011), and in 2013 near New York, at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. The first foreign production of Oresteia with the participation of Russian artistes, including the soloists of the Mariinsky Theatre Lyubov Sokolova (as Clytemnestra) and Mikhail Vekua (as Orestes), was the highlight of the Summer Festival, annually organized by the Bard College.
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