Tomorrow evening, 7 April, the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre will host the opening of the combined flute and harp music festival Virtuosi of the Flute & Northern Lyre. The initiative for holding this festival belongs to Mariinsky Theatre musicians Denis Lupachev and Sofia Kiprskaya; both these spotlight festivals first appeared five years ago and have been held each spring independently of one another. This year, the festival will feature the participation of solo performers and representatives of Russia's leading orchestras.
At the opening and the close of the festival, flautists and harpists will be performing to symphony orchestra accompaniment. Between these two gala concerts there are to be three thematic programmes: Musica da Camera (8 April), A Virtuoso Duo (9 April) and Jazz Suite (11 April). The concerts are to include performances of fantasias on operatic themes and jazz transcriptions as well as rarely-heard works from the Imperial Sheet Music Collections housed in the library of the Russian Institute of the History of the Arts. The works Fields of Golden Cloth by Andrei Rubtsov and Jurate and Castitis by Antonina Rostovskaya have been composed specially for the festival. Audiences can also look forward to premieres of works by St Petersburg composers Georgy Fyodorov, Eduard Kiprsky and Vyacheslav Kruglik.
The festival concerts will see the participation of musicians from the Mariinsky Orchestra, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, the Yevgeny Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, the National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Moscow State Academic Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra of the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera Company. The conductors of the gala concerts are to be Christian Knapp and Ivan Stolbov.
The concert on 7 April will be broadcast on the theatre's official networks and on the website mariinsky.tv. All of the musicians' performances may also be listened to live on air on mariinsky.fm radio.
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