From 15 to 29 November Moscow will be hosting the II International Festival Zaryadye. The festival's founder and Artistic Director is Valery Gergiev. In the Russian capital, the maestro will be conducting performances by stars of the Mariinsky Theatre. There will be a rendition of the "légende dramatique" La Damnation de Faust, Moscow will see its first performances of Rodion Shchedrin's new opus The Adventures of a Monkey and Sofia Gubaidulina's oratorio On Love and Hatred and there will be performances of ballets by Alexei Ratmansky and Vladimir Varnava. Festival participants are to include Denis Matsuev, Nikolai Lugansky, Alexandre Kantorow, Mao Fujita, Lorenz Nasturica-Herschowici, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Ildar Abdrazakov and Mikhail Petrenko among others.
The festival will open with a concert of symphony music in which Valery Gergiev will be conducting Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony Leningrad and Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto (soloist – Alexandre Kantorow).
One of the most important events will be the premiere of a new opus by Rodion Shchedrin – The Adventures of a Monkey after the tale by Mikhail Zoshchenko (the world premiere will take place in St Petersburg on 24 November). The composer has designated the genre of his latest opus a concerto for narrator and solo instruments accompanied by string orchestra and cembalo. The range of instruments involved is by no means trivial: trumpet, French horn, flute, harp and percussion. The composer has dedicated the work to his late wife, the legendary ballerina Maya Plisetskaya who so loved this tale by Zoshchenko. The premiere is to take place over the days celebrating the ninety-fifth anniversary of Maya Plisetskaya's birth. The role of the Narrator is to be enacted by Polina Malikova (Tolstun), an actress of the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre.
At the festival, residents of Moscow will also be able to hear Sofia Gubaidulina's oratorio On Love and Hatred for the first time (a chamber version of this work was performed in the Russian capital under the title A Simple Prayer in 2016). Gubaidulina compiled the Russo-German libretto herself, basing it on several sources, among them prayer-books and the Bible. The premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre took place in 2018.
Valery Gergiev has included works by Igor Stravinsky in the programmes for evenings of symphony music: Le Sacre du printemps and Chant funèbre are to feature, as will Concerto in D for strings. To commemorate the anniversary year of Beethoven's birth, Denis Matsuev and the Mariinsky Orchestra will be performing the Third Piano Concerto, while Japanese pianist and 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition prize-winner Mao Fujita will perform the Fourth. Nikolai Lugansky will also be appearing at the festival. He will be presenting Piano Concerto No 20 by Mozart.
An entire evening has been dedicated to the Mariinsky Theatre's Stradivarius Ensemble, to be led by Lorenz Nasturica-Herschowici, a conductor of the Münchner Philharmoniker. That programme comprises works by Fauré, Debussy, Schubert and Stravinsky.
The festival's opera playbill includes Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust. The concert performance will feature Ekaterina Semenchuk (Marguerite), Ildar Abdrazakov (Méphistophélès) and Alexander Mikhailov (Faust).
The Mariinsky Ballet will also be travelling to Moscow. The festival is to feature performances of ballets by Alexei Ratmansky: the recently premiered Seven Sonatas to music by Scarlatti and last season's revival of Concerto DSCH set to Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto. For the first time, Moscow audiences will have the opportunity to see Vladimir Varnava's ballet Daphnis et Chloé to music by Maurice Ravel. Here the dancers perform barefoot and, instead of a plot about shepherds in the Ancient World being portrayed, audiences will be asked to consider whether mankind today can attain a state of idyllic unity with the world. On both evenings Valery Gergiev will be conducting.
The full festival playbill is available on the website of the Zaryadye concert hall.
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