The final concert of the VIVACELLO XI International Cello Festival, which fits into the cultural program of the UK-Russia Year of Music 2019, will give Moscow music lovers several discoveries at once. For the first time in Russia, the legendary English cellist Raphael Wallfisch, who was a student of the great Gregor Piatigorsky, winner of the Gaspard Cassado International Competition, professor at the Higher School of Arts in Zurich will perform. The musician is known for collaborating with many legendary composers of our time and for many iconic audio recordings. In Moscow, he will present the Russian debut of the Cello and Orchestra Concerto of Gerald Finzi, one of the most revered composers in England in the 20th century, whose works are barely recognized outside the British Isles. Wallfisch is known as the best performer of this work.

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One more debut of the night is the Triple Concert of the Lithuanian composer of Jewish origin Anatolijus Shenderovas. Together with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, it will be performed by beloved by the Russian public Aylen Pritchin and Andrey Korobeynikov, and Laura van der Heijden, a young guest from England, who is still not familiar to our public. In 2002, at the age of 15, she became the winner of the BBC Young musician of the Year contest, which led her to the musical Olympus. Today she performs with the most famous orchestras in the world, and has recently released a solo album dedicated to Russian cello music. The Shenderovas triple concert was first performed in 2017 in Vilnius and Klaipeda. Specially for the VIVACELLO festival, the author intended to make a new version of the composition, but this was prevented by his sudden death. The musicians will dedicate the performance of the Triple Concert to the memory of the composer.

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The program will be opened with a cello concert by Friedrich Gulda, an outstanding Austrian composer and pianist, who left his legacy in both academic music and jazz. The concert will be soloed by the artistic director of the VIVACELLO festival, Boris Andrianov.

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The British maestro Justin Brown, a world-famous conductor, student of Seiji Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein, who currently heads the Baden State Theater in Karlsruhe and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and works closely with many leading bands and opera companies, is invited to conduct the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra known as one of the best in Russia.