From November 30 to December 25, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts will host the Svyatoslav Richter December Evenings International Music Festival for the 44th time under the artistic direction of People’s Artist of the USSR Yuri Bashmet.

This year, the theme of the festival is the work of Marc Chagall. Few artists of the twentieth century have carried such a deep and reverent attitude to musical art through their entire lives. It is no coincidence that the culmination of his work was the painting of the new ceiling of the Opera Garnier in Paris, followed by panels at the Metropolitan Opera and sketches of the scenery for The Magic Flute.

Honored Artists of Russia will perform at the concerts of the festival this year.: Polina Agureeva and Igor Gordin, violinists Tatiana Samuel (France/Belgium), Elena Korzhenevich, Grant Bashmet, Valeria Abramova, cellists Alexander Ramm, Mikhail Samsonov (Belarus) and Boris Lifanovsky, pianists Boris Berezovsky, Ksenia Bashmet, Dmitry Masleev, Semyon Skigin (Germany), Itamar Golan (Israel), harpsichordist Alexandra Koreneva, as well as saxophonist Anna Koroleva, jazz vocalist Ekaterina Nadareishvili, guest soloist of the Bavarian Opera Nikolai Zemlyanskikh, double bassist Arseniy Gazizov, artists and pianists are concertmasters of the Youth Opera Program of the Bolshoi Theater of Russia and many others.

In addition to the Moscow Soloists Chamber Ensemble under the direction of Yuri Bashmet, the leading Moscow choral ensembles will also take part in the festival concerts: the Ensemble of Modern Choral Music of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. The Gnessins’ “Altro Coro”, the Moscow Jewish Men’s Capella and the Arielle Vocal Ensemble.

“I’ve participated in almost all of the world’s major festivals, but December Nights is a special festival. And it’s not just that these are specially prepared thematic programs based on the search for consonances between music and painting, a kind of polyphony and, ultimately, the mutual enrichment of the two types of art. The festival is unique primarily because the spirit of Richter is in the hall at every concert. I am very glad that I participated in 43 festivals, and now we are going to the 44th. While Richter was still alive, we met with him in the evenings, he voiced the ideas of the program, and we, of course, mostly agreed, but everyone made their own suggestions. It was such a Richter youth council: Oleg Kagan, Natalia Gutman, me, Eliso Virsaladze. At one time, we were called the Richter gang, but it didn’t offend us, we were proud of it.

When Svyatoslav Teofilovich died, I received an offer from Irina Antonova to become the artistic director of the festival. It’s very responsible and joyful. Before that, I was the third person who, together with Antonova, persuaded Richter to open a festival here at all,” says Yuri Bashmet.

The opening concert of the festival on November 30, “May the Storm break stronger!” will be dedicated to the poetry and music of the era that gave Marc Chagall to the world. It combines poems by Alexander Blok and Sasha Cherny with music by Dmitry Shostakovich and Nikolai Myaskovsky. And in the second section, a musical and literary performance based on Mayakovsky’s poem “A Cloud in your Pants” to the music of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky will be performed by the Moscow Soloists Chamber ensemble conducted by maestro Yuri Bashmet. The reciters will be Polina Agureeva and Igor Gordin. The soloists of the evening are Dmitry Masleev (piano) and Kirill Soldatov (trumpet).

The “monographic” concerts stand apart in the program. So, on December 5, a concert offering to Svyatoslav Richter, the ideological inspirer of the December Evenings, will take place. Boris Berezovsky, an outstanding pianist of our time, will perform works by Rachmaninoff and Medtner. On December 16, the festival will host a vocal evening, on December 18 — an evening of choral music, and on December 21 — a concert of harpsichord music “Harpsichord +”.

On December 7, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts will host a concert “From Vitebsk to Paris”. The international trio — Tatiana Samuel (violin, France/Belgium), Itamar Golan (piano, Israel), Mikhail Samsonov (cello, Belarus) — will perform chamber music by Maurice Ravel, Aaron Copland and Dmitry Shostakovich.

On December 11, the guests of the concert “At the Break of Time” will hear the music of Shostakovich, Bach, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Glazunov and Sviridov performed by brilliant soloists: Ksenia Bashmet (piano), Grant Bashmet (violin), Alexander Ramm (cello), Nikolai Zemlyanskikh (baritone) and the chamber ensemble “Soloists of Moscow” conducted by maestro The shoe.

The grand final concert on December 25 will feature works by Gluck, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Ravel, Sarasate and Schoenberg, the subjects of which Marc Chagall depicted on the ceiling of the Paris Opera. In conclusion, Mozart’s symphony No. 41 “Jupiter” will be performed. It was performed by the Orchestra of the Paris Opera when Marc Chagall officially presented the completed work to the general public. Among the participants of this concert are Mark Yakovlev (flute), Ekaterina Dvoretskaya (harp), Fedor Osver (oboe), Arseniy Gazizov (double bass), the Ensemble of Modern Choral Music of the Russian Academy of Music. The Gnessins’ “Altro Coro” and the chamber ensemble “Soloists of Moscow” under the direction of maestro Yuri Bashmet.

Источник: https://t.me/russian_concert_agency