The final leg of the large-scale Genius of Place festival of musical tributes opens in St Petersburg on 24 September, in the city where Dmitri Shostakovich was born. Celebrations marking the 120th anniversary of the composer’s birth will provide a fitting finale to the festival’s third season, which has brought Valery Gergiev and leading performers and ensembles from across Russia to places associated with the country’s great composers to play their music.
The events are held with the support of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, and ROSCONCERT.
The St Petersburg programme opens at 21:00 on 24 September at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre with a work of profound significance to the city: Shostakovich’s searing Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad). Valery Gergiev will conduct the Mariinsky Orchestra.
On 25 September, Shostakovich’s birthday, some of St Petersburg’s outstanding instrumentalists will take the stage of the Concert Hall at 19:00: Ilya Papoyan, piano; Anton Kozmin and Yekaterina Gribanova, violins; Yuri Afonkin, viola; and Oleg Sendetsky, cello. The programme features the Piano Quintet and the Piano Trio No. 2.
On 28 September at 20:00 Mariinsky II will present Shakespeare. Shostakovich. Hamlet, performed by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev. People’s Artist of Russia Yevgeny Mironov will appear as narrator.
One of the most celebrated plays in world drama will be brought to the stage through the fusion of Shakespeare’s words and Shostakovich’s music. Shostakovich returned to Shakespeare more than once, not least to Hamlet. The programme includes music from the 1964 film of the same name and from Nikolai Akimov’s 1932 production at the Vakhtangov Theatre.
The third season of the festival concludes at 19:00 on 30 September. Mariinsky II will present one of the 20th century’s most demanding, enigmatic and remarkable works, Shostakovich’s phantasmagorical opera The Nose, a rarity in the repertoire. At the Mariinsky Theatre the opera is performed in Yuri Alexandrov’s acclaimed production, which received the Golden Sophit, St Petersburg’s highest theatre prize. One hour before the performance the Stravinsky Foyer will host musicologist Anna Petrova’s lecture Led by the “Nose”.
The III Genius of Place Festival of musical tributes began on 20 March in Veliky Novgorod, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s native region. It then continued with performances by Valery Gergiev and artists of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theatres in Pskov, associated with the native region of Modest Musorgsky; in Tikhvin, the birthplace of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov; in Votkinsk, the birthplace of Pyotr Tchaikovsky; in Smolensk, Mikhail Glinka’s native region; and in Oranienbaum, the birthplace of Igor Stravinsky.
The festival’s third season has set a new record for geographical reach, spanning seven Russian towns and cities and celebrating seven great composers.
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