“Do Not Leave Your Planet,” “Love Stories,” and Much More
On January 10th, the V Winter International Arts Festival kicked off in Moscow, set to last exactly one month. The event will showcase a broad and diverse program featuring leading artists and collectives: plays, concerts of jazz and classical music, and a special project from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.
Dmitry Grinchenko, a musical producer and the general director of “Russian Concert Agency LLC,” shared more details about the festival.
“Our main idea is to create an arts festival with its own face, and we continue to embody it. This year, the festival’s program is very rich. We expanded its duration, and now it runs for a whole month. The number of events has also increased, including major concerts and premieres. In the end, a unique and beautiful mosaic of the festival has emerged, and we couldn’t refuse anything. The most important thing that captivates us is the feelings people have when they leave after the concert,” the producer shared.
The festival will utilize prominent Moscow concert and theatrical venues, such as the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Moscow Art Theater named after A.P. Chekhov, the Moscow Dramatic Theater named after N.V. Gogol, and the Zaryadye Concert Hall. Participants include the Chamber Ensemble “Soloists of Moscow,” the State Symphony Orchestra “New Russia,” and the All-Russian Youth Symphony Orchestra.
Festival guests will have the opportunity to enjoy projects from different years, starting from the monoplay “Do Not Leave Your Planet” based on “The Little Prince” with the participation of Konstantin Khabensky and ending with the musical-poetic evening “Love Stories” with Mikhail Porechenkov and Irina Pegova.
A very special evening is “The Music of the Moscow Art Theater’s Performance” dedicated to the 125th anniversary of the theater.
“Very often, there are concerts of music-cinema dedicated to one director or one composer. But the story of the theater is not shown through music. We decided to fix that,” explained Dmitry. “We started with the very first play, ‘Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich,’ even found a photograph of a piece of the score that Kuzma Bodrov deciphered, and finished with works written for the Moscow Art Theater up to our time. We show the history of the theater, the history of actors, the creation of performances, the history of artistic directors through music. I think the project will be very unusual and genuinely interesting.”
A new addition will be the participation of the Pushkin Museum in the festival, where a special project called “Music of the Country from Edge to Edge” will begin on its concert stage.
“For two years, together with the Russian Geographical Society, Yuri Abramovich Bashmet, and the Chamber Ensemble ‘Soloists of Moscow,’ we flew and sailed on planes, helicopters, military ships, and military vehicles to extremely hard-to-reach and unique places of our country,” explained Dmitry Grinchenko. “This was the end of the Rybachy Peninsula, in the Murmansk region, and the Kurskaya Kosa with dunes and Turup, in the Far East, and a cape on Kamchatka. In each of these places, one part of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for String Orchestra was recorded. And finally, we are ready to present what we have achieved.”
The main invited star will be Markus Werba, an Austrian opera and chamber singer, soloist of La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, and the Bolshoi Theater of Russia. In his performance, Franz Schubert’s vocal cycle “Winterreise” will be heard.
“The festival involves a large number of foreign participants with a diverse creative palette. Here, there’s Cuban jazz, and the remarkable Austrian singer Markus Werba, who will sing Schubert’s cycle ‘Winter Journey.’ From Spain, Duquende will come, one of the most famous contemporary flamenco performers in the world. He will perform on February 5th, on his birthday—and as he joyfully noted, it will be the first time he spends this day in Moscow.”
The closing gala concert of the festival will take place on February 10th at the Zaryadye Concert Hall. The program will present a combination of Italian-Austrian music, focusing on the works of Rossini and Schubert, with a small inclusion of Tartini.
Photo: freepik