Big "Щ" of Russian music. Shchedrinsky November in the Mariinsky

ST. PETERSBURG. The Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg hosts a retrospective of Rodion Shchedrin’s works

The place and time of the festival was not chosen by chance. November is a special month for Rodion Shchedrin and Maya Plisetskaya, whose anniversary is celebrated today. Alas, without the ballerina herself, who dreamed that day to go on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater, but died on May 2, 2015. He could not come these days from Munich. A long-standing friendship connects the composer with the Mariinsky Theater. The opera Levsha, which opened the festival, was timed to coincide with the anniversary of Gergiev. Its world premiere took place in 2013 at the Stars of the White Nights festival. “Left-hander” is not the first appeal to Leskov’s prose. The author, underestimated and forbidden in the last years of his life and after, under the Bolsheviks (while in the West he was considered a writer comparable in talent to Dostoevsky), embodied in Lefty the collective image of talented and not useful at home. The same as himself. The innovative musical language, the use of ethnic instruments: duduk, hackbret, bagpipes, flutes, pitfalls, the active participation of the choir, allowed to give the phantasmagoric plot maximum expressiveness and tragedy. On November 6, Mariinsky spectators were able to see the wonderful ballet The Little Humpbacked Horse staged by Ratmansky, which gave Shchedrin a fateful meeting with Maya Plisetskaya. The next day, the audience was expected by one of the most powerful, complex and rarely performed in Russia works directed by Vasily Barkhatov. In the remaining days, the audience will meet with the ballets "Anna Karenina", "Carmen" and the choral opera " Boyar Morozova ". Shchedrin, considered one of the best contemporary composers of the 20th century, remains to him in the 21st century. The human qualities of the big "U", as Andrei Voznesensky called it, were in no way inferior to talent. It is enough to mention the refusal to support the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia and the long ascetic work in the Union of Composers. While in the presidency, he helped a huge number of talented people, saving them for art.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru