OPENING CONCERT OF THE FESTIVAL

This year the festival will open with a great concert featuring double concertos for violin, cello and orchestra. The concert will start with Vivaldi’s Concerto performed by virtuoso artists Alexey Lundin (violin) and Fedor Amosov (cello). Next Camille Saint-Saens’ romantic composition La Muse et le Poete will be performed. The composer wrote this work in 1910 and called his doulble concerto for violin and cello “a dialogue of two instruments rather than a competition of two virtuosos”.

After that Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso will be performed. Concerto grosso used to be a popular genre of the period of baroque based on opposing solo instruments and the orchestra. Alfred Schnitke described this genre using the following metaphor: solo instruments are a person and his soul, and the orchestra is the person’s environment which a person is often opposed to. Schnittke’s concerto will be performed by Narek Akhnazaryan (cello) and Nikita Borisoglebsky (violin).

Boris Andrianov (cello) and Boris Brovtsyn (violin) will appear with Giya Kancheli’s amazingly soulful work Silent Prayer. The poetry of silence has always been something special for the composer. As Kancheli himself noted, there are different types of silence, however, as soon as the audience is filled with ringing silence, all other things pale into insignificance. “This kind of silence is associated with a rare phenomenon when the binding threads uniting the conductor and the audience appear and become tangible though there are not real. The sound is born in the silence,” said the composer.

All the works will be accompanied by the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dmitri Jurowski. Special guests of the opening concert of the festival will be Tim Park, a world-known American cellist, and Rennosuke Fukuda, a young Japanese violinist, who won his first international competition two years ago, when he was 13.