The program of the current Easter Festival makes an ambiguous impression. On the one hand, we can see the traditional logistical exploits of the crash regional program, the grand scale of choir posters, and the obvious social significance of special philanthropic projects. Meanwhile, for the metropolitan public – and the forum still proudly bears the “Moscow” name – the content of three festival weeks and a half comes down to performing the two large-scale series: all symphonies and piano concertos by Sergey Prokofiev with a rather scanty supplement in the form of pieces by other composers. In the past years the symphony concert events of the Moscow block would retreat into the background, so that experts were even embarrassed to continue addressing the central program as a “symphonic one” – the need for quotation marks was dictated by the poster’s genre diversity. This time, however, the MEF looks more like a residence festival of Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra.
The main problem is that from repertoire perspectives the program of the XI Easter Festival is not a very inventive digest of the past Moscow performances of Mariinsky instrumentalists in general and Valery Gergiev in particular. The invited soloists – Sergey Babayan, Alexei Volodin, Denis Matsuev, Alexander Toradze and Daniel Trifonov – are well-known to Moscow audiences. Among the pleasant surprises is only the concert of Christian Blackshaw, a British pianist with the reputation of an intellectual. One can surely find certain ritual delight in listening to another recital of Dmitry Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony or Fantastic Symphony by Hector Berlioz, which is not very much different from the previous ones, or in the comparative analysis of the recitals of both Prokofiev’s cycles. But people expect from any musical festival, especially from the one with such a solid background as the MEF, above all, some pleasant surprises or the extension of the habitual boundaries. With hand on heart, as you stand motionless in awe, facing one of the most influential national cultural institutions, you have to admit that there’s nothing of the kind in the Easter Festival’s poster.
Talking about the novelties, the final secularization of the symphony program should be considered as the key trend of this year: an opening concert will go without the Russian Easter Festival Overture by Rimsky-Korsakov which is another emblem and mascot of MEF along with the concert on Worship Mount, while the Mass by Igor Stravinsky that could easily assume upon itself the entire spiritual weight of the forum, will be performed in Saint Petersburg, rather than in Moscow. The only spiritual piece in the Moscow poster is Stabat Mater by metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) – this artistically dubious event led by Valery Gergiev will open the choral block of the festival in the Hall of Church Councils of the Christ the Savior’s Cathedral. Earlier on, the traditions of Christian spirituality were thoroughly kept at MEF by means of the concerts of ancient music with participation of the European stars of historically informed performance like Viktoria Mullova or Philippe Herreweghe – the traditional climax of the program. Yet in recent years the organizers have given up on this component, and this certainly entailed a significant contraction of the festival audience.
Perhaps only two opera events truly stand out in the MEF-2012 poster. The first is the concerto performance of Don Quixote – a rarity score by Jules Massenet that will be sung in Moscow by the same soloists who performed it for the recent bestseller Mariinsky Label: Italian maestro Ferruccio Furlanetto performing the primary aria and charming graduates of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers, Andrei Serov and Anna Kiknadze (two years ago MEF already brought this title with an identical vocal cast, but then Tugan Sokhiev, rather than maestro Gergiev conducted). The second major event is another concerto performance – third act of Wagner’s Valkyrie, also was performed at one of the previous festivals.
This time, however, Muscovites will not be lured by Bryn Terfel acting as Wotan, but by the duet of Nina Stemme, who has never performed in the capital city, and Yevgeny Nikitin.
Dmitry Renansky
Source: Kommersant
