To mark Victory Day, the playbill of the Mariinsky Theatre traditionally features performances and concerts that commemorate this remarkable date. Though currently unable to admit audiences, the theatre is neverless retaining its connections with the public and is moving its events online, screening a series of dedicated broadcasts and mounting the major virtual exhibition The Theatre During the War Years. The broadcasts will be available to view via the platform mariinsky.tv.
On 8 May at 18.00 together with the international cultural project Russian Seasons, mariinsky.tv will be broadcasting the epistolary concert Together in Hard Times, which is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. This project was developed by the joint forces of musicians from the Mariinsky Theatre, Berlin's Konzerthaus and the Moscow State Philharmonic. The sixty-minute-long programme includes works by Olivier Messiaen, Samuel Barber, Dmitry Shostakovich, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Modest Musorgsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff that have been recorded specially for this evening. During the concert the German actor Martin Wuttke and the Russian actress Elizaveta Boyarskaya will read extracts from works by Anna Akhmatova, Olga Berggolts and Ingeborg Bachmann. Addressing the audience will be the world-acclaimed conductors Valery Gergiev, Daniel Barenboim and Christoph Eschenbach as well as the pianist Denis Matsuev.
At 19.00 on mariinsky.tv there will be a broadcast of one of the greatest classical Russian operas – Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace after the eponymous novel by Leo Tolstoy. This broadcast continues the Prokofiev Marathon online and will form a dedication to victory and Russian military prowess. The premiere of this epic production by Andrei Konchalovsky and designer George Tsypin with its complex sets weighing over sixty tonnes and almost one thousand costumes took place in March 2000. Conceived as a co-production, it was performed at the Metropolitan Opera and enjoyed spectacular success when presented on tour. It has been seen at theatres in Europe, Asia and America and introduced a new star to the international stage – Anna Netrebko. In the recording from 2003 it is she who dazzles as Natasha Rostova. Also in the lead roles were Vladimir Moroz (Andrei Bolkonsky), Gegam Grigorian (Pierre Bezukhov), Ekaterina Semenchuk (Sonya), Olga Savova (Hélène Bezukhova), Oleg Balashov (Anatole Kuragin), Irina Bogacheva (Akhrosimova), Mikhail Kit (Count Ilya Rostov), Zlata Bulycheva (Princess Marya), Gennady Bezzubenkov (Mikhail Kutuzov), Fyodor Mozhaev (Napoleon) and and Yevgeny Nikitin (Dolokhov). It was conducted by Valery Gergiev.
On Victory Day at 14.00 the musical dedication will continue with other works by Prokofiev: the cantata Alexander Nevsky and the oratorio Ivan the Terrible. In 2016 these were performed and recorded by Olga Borodina (mezzo-soprano), Yulia Matochkina (mezzo-soprano), Mikhail Petrenko (bass), the actor Alexei Petrenko as the Narrator and the Mariinsky Chorus and Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev.
On 9 May at 20.00 there will be a broadcast of the legendary Seventh Symphony Leningrad by Dmitry Shostakovich. This majestic music about human resistance to violence and tyranny was performed by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev.
For the anniversary date, the theatre's website has prepared a huge virtual project about how the Mariinsky Theatre (then the Kirov) and its performers survived the terrifying years of the Great Patriotic War. The exhibition, which features over one hundred rare and some never-before-seen images, is divided into six thematic chapters. The largest of them is dedicated to the company's work during its evacuation to Molotov (Perm) and the fates of those performers who stayed behind in Leningrad during the Siege. The greater part of materials presented comes from the Mariinsky Theatre's archives. Even during the war, staff of the literary department who had been evacuated to Molotov, kept a careful chronicle of events, pasting all press reviews of performances into albums and collecting photographs from rehearsals and performances, playbills and programmes. Since the 1980s the theatre has often hosted events for veterans and recorded their recollections. Today this project affords the opportunity to learn from these unique materials: photographs, for example, of concerts by brigades at the front or rehearsals of the ballet Cinderella in Perm, sketches by renowned artists for productions during the war years, playbills and programmes, letters and pages from diaries. As the texts selected have been published at different times – from 1948 to 2020 – in them we can hear not just a different intonation depending on the personality of the "speakers", but also varying degrees of self-censorship. And so fiery lines from private diaries of those who witnessed the siege may sit within the narrative alongside more cold-blooded tales about the hell of a war that is now in the remote past.
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