October 20–31, 2021
The International Organ Festival is being held at the Mariinsky Theatre for the ninth time. Musicians from Russia, Germany, France, Poland and Austria are to present rich and varied organ music programmes, encompassing repertoire from the Baroque to the present day.
The festival is to be opened by Thierry Escaich a regular visitor to organ music concerts and festivals at the Mariinsky Theatre. For the solo part of his concert there will be works by Bach, Brahms, Reger and Franck, as well as a fantasia on a chorale theme which the musician will be improvising. Accompanied by the Mariinsky Orchestra, Escaich will be presenting Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie concertante – this is being performed at the Concert Hall for the first time.
The concert programme of Marina Väisä, aimed at a young audience, includes works for organ and transcriptions of popular classics – this concert presents a unique opportunity to familiarise oneself with the sound of the organ for the first time.
Making his debut at the festival is Martin Sander, a prize-winner at numerous competitions and an acclaimed specialist in the German organ repertoire. Sander will be performing works by Bach Vater and Bach Sohn in a dialogue with “tributes” to Bach from the 19th century. Adding to this dialogue will be organ transcriptions of works by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Wagner, thus presenting familiar music in new timbres and colours. Lilia Yakusheva will also be making her first appearance at the festival. Her programme features music by composers of the German and French schools of the 18th-19th centuries.
The three final festival concerts are set to include prize-winners of the Grand Prix de Chartres competition – Daria Burlak, Johannes Zeinler and Karol Mossakowski. The Grand Prix de Chartres is one of the world’s most prestigious organ competitions, victory at which opens up the path to an international performing career for the musicians. The Mariinsky Theatre’s festival and subscription series concerts regularly feature prize-winners from that competition of recent years.
Daria Burlak, a prize-winner at the 2018 competition, has compiled a programme of music by exclusively French composers: her own transcriptions of orchestral works by Ravel and Debussy sit alongside exotic miniatures and monumental frescoes on a symphonic scale by Charles Tournemire and Marcel Dupré. Johannes Zeinler, the first Austrian prize-winner at the Chartres competition (2018), is to perform opuses by Bach and Mozart, though he will also be tackling the French repertoire – Baroque pieces by Nicolas de Grigny and the Tenth Organ Symphony – the last – by Charles-Marie Widor. For the conclusion of the festival, on one evening Karol Mossakowski, a prize-winner at Chartres in 2016, will be presenting Six Organ Sonatas by Felix Mendelssohn, who was an outstanding performer as well as a composer who laid the foundations for the German Romantic organ school.
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