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The Easter Festival was held in Moscow and 24 Russian cities
From April 8 to May 9, Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky and invited musicians gave more than 120 concerts as part of the symphony, choral, ringing and theater programs of the Easter Festival. There were over a thousand participants in the festival, and the audience numbered more than 40 thousand people.The symphony program in Moscow was not as extensive as in previous years, but non-trivial and strong. The opening was memorable for the beautiful and fresh playing of the Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos (the played Tchaikovsky Concerto sounded reverently heroic), and the closing put a spectacular end to the festival’s dedication to Stravinsky. One of the main Mariinsky blockbusters “The Rite of Spring”, as always, made a stunning impression, “Wind Symphonies” not only demonstrated the class of wind players, but also opened up new repertoire territories, and in the rare “Les Noces” the ensemble of soloists worked excellently - Irina Vasilyeva, Olga Savvova, Gennady Bezzubenkov and Alexander Timchenko.
One of the main events of the festival was promised to be the Moscow screening of the latest Mariinsky premiere - Prokofiev’s opera “The Love for Three Oranges” staged by Alain Maratre. His “Journey to Reims,” for all its modest undertaking and careful handwriting, achieved enormous success. “The Love for Three Oranges” is almost no different from “Journey”. The same sweet, bright, neat scenography, the same fashion show, touching humorous style and a lot of action in the stalls and on the balconies.
Compared to the background of many St. Petersburg performances (including those that Gergiev brought to Moscow), this is a cute trifle, which disappointed many with its provincial poverty of imagination, and many were attracted by its unobtrusive cheerfulness. One way or another, the main and most important events of the festival turned out to be others. One of them is the Volga tour as part of a regional program. Perhaps now not only the Pletnevsky RNO, but also the Gergiev Mariinsky Theater will float along the Volga with an orchestra.
The Mariinsky Orchestra opened the regional program on April 9 in Nizhny Novgorod - the day after the Moscow start. The orchestra has already performed at the Nizhny Novgorod Philharmonic and visited Ulyanovsk, Samara and Tolyatti for the first time.
The St. Petersburgers gave six concerts in four cities of the Volga region in four days. “What other world-famous orchestra would do this,” says Gergiev. Moreover, at regional concerts the band demonstrated such a level of performance that listeners had no idea about the super-busy touring schedule. Moreover, with their interpretations, the musicians proved that they do not differentiate between metropolitan and provincial music lovers, for whom the arrival of the Mariinsky became a holiday. The special train, traveling according to an individual schedule, was greeted with welcome banners and seen off with the “Farewell of the Slav”; the performances took place in crowded halls, the audience applauded while standing. Half of the concerts were for charity; the price of tickets for others can be called symbolic.
The tour program, which offered both hits and rarities, had three main blocks: works by Stravinsky, music by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler (“the main and secondary themes of the festival”), works by three composers whose names are associated with Stravinsky and St. Petersburg - Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Debussy, “who were influenced by Russian music.” And the interpretation of the works united by the theme of St. Petersburg turned out to be related. In the Russian key (closer to landscape sound painting than to fantasy, bliss and languor) Debussy sounded - the prelude “The Afternoon of a Faun” and the symphonic sketches “The Sea”. Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Bright Holiday” overture, written for Easter, was performed twice, completely appropriate for the occasion and repeatedly performed as part of the Moscow Easter Festival. Another "calling card" of the Mariinsky Orchestra - the symphonic suite "Scheherazade" - became an epic landscape fresco with a grandiose culmination of the theme of the sea at the conclusion.
There have been replacements and additions to regional programs. In the Great Hall of the Lenin Memorial in Ulyanovsk “Martyrdom of St. Debussy's Sebastian and Scheherazade were replaced by Stravinsky's Petrushka and The Afternoon of a Faun. According to the maestro, the revision of the programs is due to the acoustics of the halls and care for the musicians and listeners: “The first five to ten, and maybe all 30 minutes of rehearsal are very important. I'm afraid of new halls. If the hall is small, then in “Scheherazade” the strings have to force the sound.”
The performance of Stravinsky in the provinces sounded enlightening: “We are interested in him, and we hope that interest in him will appear here too,” - this is how Gergiev opened the program in Nizhny Novgorod, where the Symphony in C, created at the peak of the “neoclassical period,” was performed. Interpretation maestro, the music of Stravinsky, “who lived 20 meters from the Mariinsky Theater,” is restrained, academic, architectural, cool in a St. Petersburg way. And the humor of the Mockingbird composer, often interpreted sarcastically, was voiced by the Mariinsky in English with restraint. It manifested itself in the relaxed gentlemanly remarks of the neoclassical symphony, and in the ballet-poker (ballet in three hands “Game of Cards”), and in the songs of the wind blowing Petrushka, similar to the hero of Dostoevsky.
The orchestra, which had recently taken up Stravinsky's music, easily overcame all the tricks of the score.
The “side” theme of the festival - Wagner and Mahler - made a strong impression. Mahler's Fifth Symphony, performed in Nizhny, is significant for the ensemble: a hundred years ago, the author himself stood at the controls of the Mariinsky Orchestra. And the Samara residents with the first act of Wagner’s “Siegfried” and the Tolyatti residents with the third act of “Die Walküre” required neither scenery nor translation - the acting of the artists (especially Andrei Popov - Mime) and the orchestra was so good. Moreover, the Togliatti stage, which had never seen such a crowd, had to be expanded into four rows of stalls (which did not save us from acoustic difficulties).
Let us note the high level of organization of the tour with the support of a fan of the Mariinsky Theater, Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Federation in the Volga District, Alexander Konovalov, and the Samara group SOK. And on the next Volga tour the troupe will probably go swimming. “I have long been thinking about a major tour of the Mariinsky Theater along the Volga, on a beautiful ship, perhaps with friends of the theater, perhaps from Rybinsk to Astrakhan. And conversations about this are already underway,” Gergiev admitted.