INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL IN YAROSLAVL
When Yuri Bashmet first invited his friends and fellow-thinkers to the first festival in the ancient northern Russian city in 2009, the event was rather modest. Yet already the following year, the festival in Yaroslavl increased its scale and significance, which have been growing ever since.
For more than fifteen years, leading Russian and world musicians, orchestras, conductors, and actors have been coming to Yaroslavl every year. The festival has become not only the main cultural event in Yaroslavl and the Yaroslavl region, but also one of the most important cultural events in Russia within the framework of academic art, as well as one of the most long-awaited events for the residents of Yaroslavl and the Yaroslavl region.
The festival in Yaroslavl aims at displaying the rich variety of academic music and introducing the audience to musicians and famous ensembles that have never performed in Russia before. Thus, the Russian Concert Agency invited the string sextet of the Vienna Philharmonic, the ensemble of soloists of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the French ensemble “Les Percussions de Strasbourg,” the Italian baroque ensemble “Soqquadro Italiano,” and the British brass ensemble “London Brass” to Yaroslavl to perform for the first time for Russian music lovers. In Yaroslavl, Russian listeners also got themselves acquainted with the performance of one of the world’s best flautists, Sir James Galway; it was also in Yaroslavl that the outstanding Chinese composer, Academy Award winner, and winner of the International Shostakovich Prize Tan Dun performed for the Russian public for the first time.
Yaroslavl has also featured the best European chamber ensembles: “I Virtuosi Italiani,” “Camerata Salzburg,” the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra (Hungary), the Trondheim Soloists chamber orchestra (Norway), the Estonian ensemble “Hortus Musikus,” the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Dvořák Chamber Orchestra (Czech Republic), the baroque ensemble “il Gardellino” (Belgium), the all-men singing group “A Filetta” (Corsica, France), the brass ensemble “Spanish Brass” (Spain).
The Yaroslavl festival program invariably includes ethnic music and world premieres. Maestro Bashmet often says that the audience in Yaroslavl has a particularly fine ear for music, which is why it is often the first to hear the works by contemporary composers commissioned by the festival.
The Yaroslavl festival featured performances by legends of the music and performing arts (Natalia Gutman, Viktor Tretyakov, Vasily Lobanov, Paul Badura-Skoda, Elizabeth Leonskaya) and outstanding musicians of the new generation (Denis Matsuev, Olli Mustonen, Vadim Repin, Alexander Rudin), Grand Prix winners of prestigious international competitions (Kristóf Baráti, Massimo Quarta, Agata Szymczewska, Alexander Ramm, Vadim Kholodenko, Philip Kopachevsky), renowned Russian actors (Oleg Menshikov, Konstantin Khabensky, Evgeny Stychkin), and many others.
The festival concerts take place not only in Yaroslavl but also in the cities of the Yaroslavl region. Over the past years, the festival has covered twenty regional cities and towns, most of which were introduced to live classic music performances by the festival concerts. The continuous growth of the festival’s geography and the steady increase of the accessibility of culture and music for the people in Russia is one of the festival’s priorities. The festival’s popularity is now so high that tickets are sold out at the start of sales, and festival events take place not only in the Yaroslavl State Philharmonic Society but also at the Volkov Russian State Academic Theatre and the “Millennium” Concert Hall.
Since 2017, the program of the Yaroslavl festival has included international conferences devoted to various aspects of music performance and the study of musical heritage. It also includes pre-concerts, a new educational project that offers all ticket holders lectures that give a detailed overview of the event one hour before the concert.
In 2017, the festival also launched the International Brass Academy for gifted children. In 2019, two educational projects took place at once for the first time: the International Baroque Academy for violin, cello, flute, oboe, harpsichord, and vocals and the School for Young Journalists writing about cultural life and academic art in regional media.
Maestro Bashmet’s initiative, supported by his colleagues in Russia and all over the world, has taken root in the cultural life of Yaroslavl, thus making the vibrant world-class music festival but another wonderful tradition of the city with a thousand-year history.