On 20 December Valery Gergiev and South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho opened the XVI International Piano Festival Mariinsky. The festival playbill features the names not only of such acclaimed maestri of the piano as Denis Matsuev, Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Lugansky but also concerts by young pianists, among them prize-winners of the Tchaikovsky and Chopin Competitions.
The festival playbill is incredibly intense: over the course of twelve days, its two main venues – the Concert Hall and the chamber-music Rachmaninoff Hall – will host twenty-one concerts. These include recitals and appearances with the orchestra under the baton of maestro Gergiev.
At the festival’s closing concert on 31 December, the public will have the opportunity to hear recent victors of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw – Bruce Liu and Alexander Gadjiev, as well as seventeen-year-old Eva Gevorgyan from Moscow, a finalist in the competition. Other festival participants include Tchaikovsky Competition prize-winners Sergei Redkin, Dmitry Shishkin and Alexandre Kantorow.
There will also be a chance to discover young and up-and-coming pianists at class concerts led by respected St Petersburg teachers from the Conservatory’s Ten-Year School: Zora Zucker, Anna Rychkova, Zoya Sapiton and Vladimir Suslov, as well as a class to be led by Grigory Gruzman who teaches in Weimar.
For each festival, the organisers – Mira Yevtich and Valery Gergiev – strive to invite musicians who have not yet appeared in St Petersburg. In addition to the victors of the Warsaw competition, the Mariinsky Theatre is to host performances by Croatian pianist Lovre Marušić, who won the Silver Medal this summer at the Cleveland International Piano Competition.
The concert programmes will essentially present a complete anthology of piano music: from preludes and fugues by Bach, sonatas by Mozart and van Beethoven and works by Romantics and Impressionists to concerti by Shchedrin and pieces by Stravinsky.
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