From Chicago to Montreal and from Stravinsky to Rachmaninoff

The Mariinsky Orchestra continues its North American tour with a concert in Montreal.

The Mariinsky Orchestra’s two-week tour of cities in the USA and Canada continues on 4 October with a concert in Montreal. Here maestro Gergiev will be conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra in a programme of works by Sergei Rachmaninoff from different periods of the composer’s life. These will include both famous and rarely-performed opuses, among them the early symphonic poem The Rock (1893), the audience favourites Piano Concerti Nos 2 and 3 and the composer’s final work Symphonic Dances, written at the same time as the outbreak of WW II. The piano solo will be performed by Denis Matsuev, an internationally acclaimed Russian pianist and longstanding colleague of the Mariinsky Orchestra. The same programme will be performed at Carnegie Hall in New York on 15 October at the close of the tour.

The Mariinsky Orchestra’s tour began on 2 October in Chicago, where the audience gave an enthusiastic reception to a programme including three ballets by Igor Stravinsky – Le Sacre du printemps, the centenary of which is being widely celebrated in the music world in 2013, Pétrouchka and The Firebird. For its encore the orchestra performed Anatoly Lyadov’s The Enchanted Lake. According to the reviewer of the Chicago Classical Review, “Chicago, fortunately, received the most generous and intriguing program of this Mariinsky tour.” The journalist commented on the quality of the playing of the Mariinsky Orchestra, noting that under the baton of Valery Gergiev the ensemble’s sound “has (...) a polish and tonal refinement more European” and that “even in this age of orchestral internationalization, the Mariinsky’s lineage was fitfully apparent.”

During the tour, the orchestra will also be performing in Toronto, three times in New York at Carnegie Hall and in Newark and Washington under the baton of Valery Gergiev and in the university towns of Ithaca, Princeton and Purchase under Ignat Solzhenitsyn. The programmes of the Mariinsky Orchestra’s performances have been compiled entirely from instrumental masterpieces by Russian composers.

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