Valery Gergiev and the staff of the Mariinsky Theatre would like to express their sincere condolences to the family, friends, colleagues and pupils of Sergei Mikhailovich Slonimsky – an outstanding composer, pianist and professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory.
Having spent his entire life in the city on the Neva, Sergei Mikhailovich was a true composer of St Petersburg. He was known as the patriarch of the St Petersburg school of composition, while he thought of himself as a “Petersburg dreamer”. He became a classic during his own lifetime, retaining his creative faculties and often responding through his new opuses to the demands of society and the age, and he composed because “he could not not compose.”
Sergei Slonimsky’s works were often performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, particularly in recent years. In the mid-2000s it was here that there came Mihail Chemiakin’s ballet The Magic Nut (a unique “prequel” to The Nutcracker), the music for which Slonimsky composed following a commission from the theatre. Members of the Mariinsky Company performed symphony and chamber music by the composer. In October 2019 at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre the orchestra of the St Petersburg Conservatory presented the world premiere of Symphonic Chant – one of Sergei Mikhailovich’s final creations.
But the composer was famous not just for his classical music. For many compatriots, his name was inextricably linked with the cinema, for which he wrote with equal passion. And there his recognisable artistic signature took on fresh colours, his melodies enjoying tremendous popularity with the public.
A modest yet deep-thinking man, Sergei Mikhailovich always considered the greatest gift to him to be any performance of his works. This music and his numerous pupils preserve the memory of the composer, without whom it would be impossible to imagine St Petersburg.
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