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30.04.07
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Easter Parade
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By Raymond Stults
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Sixth Annual Easter Festival Enriches Moscow’s Music Scene.
Springtime in the Russian capital has once again brought with it, for the sixth year in a row, an enormous outpouring of music in the form of the Moscow Easter Festival, this time scheduled for a record run of 32 days, starting on Easter Sunday, April 8, and closing, as in the past, on Victory Day, May 9.
The first Easter Festival, in 2002, was conjured up at the very last minute by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and the internationally acclaimed conductor and director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Thea-ter, Valery Gergiev, who has acted as the festival’s artistic director ever since.
For Luzhkov, the festival represented yet another of his numerous grand gestures - be it in culture, sports or promoting the construction of super-sized buildings- aimed at overcoming whatever inferiority Muscovites might feel in comparison to the denizens of other major cities of the world. For Gergiev, it appeared to fulfill a long-standing desire on his part to add Moscow to a far-flung and, to some minds, already overextended musical empire.
Not only has Gergiev served as the festival’s artistic director, but from the very beginning he and the forces of his Mariinsky Theater have dominated it musically. This year, in fact, unlike any in the past, the festival’s central feature, its so-called “symphonic program,” is entirely in the hands of Gergiev and the Mariinsky, except for a pair of instrumental soloists from elsewhere.
The basic features of the first festival have been retained: The symphonic program, which includes a series of orchestral concerts and an occasional fully-staged opera, choral singing by choruses from both Russia and other mainly Orthodox countries, bell-ringing each afternoon of the festival from the towers of Moscow churches and a group of charitable events, culminating in an outdoor concert for one and all to attend, free of charge, on Victory Day. This year the festival has also added ballet. Three years ago, following a decree by President Vladimir Putin that gave the festival so-called “federal status,” it added to its agenda an extensive program of concerts reaching beyond Moscow to regional centers throughout the country.
Needless to say, Maestro Gergiev was hardly the man to resist joining in on the regional program, despite an already taxing schedule of Moscow festival appearances and duties in between back home in St. Petersburg. Last year he and the Mariinsky performed a near-impossible feat by presenting fully-staged opera on successive evenings in the distant Siberian cities of Khanty-Mansiisk, Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, in the space of three days between Moscow concerts, and shortly afterward taking concert programs southward to Kransnodar.
Meeting with the press just before last year’s final festival concert, an obviously exhausted Gergiev admitted that he had assumed too heavy a burden and declared that a somewhat different schedule would be in order for the 2007 festival. And somewhat different it did turn out to be - this year there were fewer Moscow concerts scheduled and a Mariinsky regional tour confined entirely to concert performances and reaching only to three cities along the relatively close by Middle Volga, plus the not much more distant Bashkortostan capital of Ufa.
This year’s choral program has brought the same interesting mixture of choruses as in the past, including visiting groups from Kaliningrad, Novosibirsk and Vladikavkaz, as well as notable ensembles from Armenia, Georgia, Serbia and Ukraine. Bell-ringing from the churches of Moscow has also con-tinued, as usual, on each festival day. The symphonic program, however, has proved to be something of a disappointment, at least when compared to past festivals. Artistic direction was apparently admin-istered with a very light hand. Indeed, it must not have taken Gergiev more than a few minutes to put the program together.
The focus of the Mariinsky Orchestra’s concerts at the past three festivals has been the music of a single composer - Sergei Prokofiev in 2004, Ludwig van Beethoven in 2005 and Dmitry Shostakovich last year, for the occasion of the centennial of his birth. The 2007 festival has bestowed the honor on Igor Stravinsky, in celebration of this year’s 125th anniversary of his birth, with the repeat of a few pieces from past festivals and only three of the composer’s rarely heard symphonies, plus his oratorio-like opera “Oedipus Rex.”
In the past, the festival’s symphonic program has boasted not only a more imaginative choice of music, but also a glittering array of soloists, including vocal superstars Anna Netrebko, Olga Borodina and, making his Moscow debut at last year’s festival, the great Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel. Instrumental soloists have included pianists Yefim Bronfman, Vladimir Feltsman, Lang Lang, Mikhail Pletnev and Alexander Toradze, violinists Viktoria Mullova and Vadim Repin and cellist Misha Maisky. For this year, the festival has merely come up with a return performance by Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos, an excellent artist, but playing nothing more than the Violin Concerto of Peter Tchaikovsky, a work that must turn up at least a dozen times each season on Moscow concert programs, and the festival debut of a young and highly regarded Russian pianist, Alexei Volodin, also appearing with a rather overplayed work, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
The highlight of this year’s festival is likely to be the fully staged Mariinsky performance, under Gergiev’s baton, of Prokofiev’s opera “Love for Three Oranges,” which had its premiere during March in St. Petersburg to considerable public and critical acclaim.
A visit to Moscow by the Mariinsky’s ballet company is always a welcome event, and scheduling it for this year’s Easter Festival was undoubtedly celebrated by local ballet goers. Its five evenings, however, have offered nothing new - no doubt because the Mariinsky has, in fact, nothing new to offer: the tried and tested Swan Lake, with Mariinsky star ballerina Ulyana Lopatkina dancing the dual role of Odette/Odile; and Don Quixote, followed by three evenings from the theater’s repertoire of modern works, all previously seen in Moscow, but all well worth another look - a trio of one-act ballets in the cutting-edge choreography of German-based American William Forsythe that is perhaps the most exciting program of dance to be found anywhere in Russia today; George Balanchine’s full-length mas-terpiece Jewels; and a program of the same choreographer’s shorter works.
Every past Moscow Easter Festival has had its ups and downs. In the former category have been some performances of extraordinary brilliance from Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, especially the cycle of Prokofiev symphonies played in 2004, as well as the Shostakovich symphonies 4, 7 and 15 and certain works by Stravinsky heard at various festivals. Among well-remembered performances with soloists and orchestra have been Pletnev’s reading of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Lang Lang’s interpretation of the same composer’s second piano concerto, Vadim Repin’s version of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Terfel’s singing of Wotan in a concert version of the third act of Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walkure.”
Equally memorable was the Mariinsky’s staged version two years ago of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace - particularly Netrebko’s flawless singing in the role of Natasha - despite an almost total absence, due to the technical limitations of the Russian Army Theater, of the production’s elaborate scenery and a much reduced orchestra. And few who heard them will forget the performances in 2004 by Mullova, Feltsman and the Belgian Collegium Vocale of Ghent of music by Johann Sebastian Bach.
But the festival has also brought its share of disappointments, particularly with performances by Ger-giev and his orchestra that have sounded tired, under-rehearsed and lacking in real interpretive depth. The Beethoven symphonies, for example, which formed the centerpiece of the festival two years ago, simply failed to catch fire, and the great Choral Symphony, No. 9, proved a near-fiasco.
As festival fiascos go, however, nothing could beat the staging of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov the festival attempted to present outdoors four years ago on Cathedral Square in the Moscow Kremlin. The idea itself was certainly a commendable one, but it failed to take into account the fickleness of Moscow’s early May weather. As bad luck would have it, the appointed evening turned out to be cold, windy and wet. After much debate backstage, the show finally commenced at 10 p.m., an hour and a half after its scheduled starting time, with what was left of the audience huddled under army blankets exhumed from the Kremlin’s cellars.
ubstituting for the violins and other string instruments, which might have suffered irreparable damage under the incessant drizzle, was battered old upright piano. On the podium, a seemingly unfazed Maestro Gergiev led the proceedings dressed in a raincoat and baseball cap. Considering the miserable conditions and the artificially amplified sound, it was impossible to make any real judgment as to the quality of the performance, musically or otherwise. Needless to say, however, the festival has never again undertaken anything of a similar sort.
Whatever its faults and weaknesses, the Moscow Easter Festival certainly seems here to stay, and no one is likely even to suggest excluding the Mariinsky or replacing Gergiev as the festival’s artistic di-rector. The regular appearance of both is a valuable addition to the musical life of Moscow. But looking toward the future, the main symphonic program would almost certainly benefit from a more daring and imaginative approach to the choice of music and from extending invitations to other orchestras and conductors and to perhaps a greater variety of soloists. Above all, if the festival is to be truly Moscow’s, then some use surely ought to made, as has rarely been the case to date, of the city’s own enormous musical resources. |
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