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diversified forms of chamber music to all our friends and sympathizers, bringing new, sometimes unexpected, but always bright colors to the music palette of St. Petersburg.
Our festival owed something to Russian musical literature: we did not pay it due attention in the first two years. The Five Evenings 2002 will repay the debt hundredfold, for the discovery concert and the evening dedicated to music of Dmitry Smirnov will hopefully become more than just colorful events of this festival. May they remind us of the musical aura of St. Petersburg, a concept that unfortunately has faded much in the recent years.
The first of The Evenings is unique not so much by its list of performers (true, most of them are well–known to music lovers and specialists by their numerous performances solo or in ensembles), but rather by bringing together a bunch of very talented young pianists in one program and under one brand — they all were students in the class of Alexander Sandler at the Conservatory.
It is always hard for an excellent performer to decide in favor of teaching. The students show results when the teacher puts in his/her self daily and fully, and concertizing is known to exhaust a musician without reserve. The profound inner world of Alexander Sandler is brightly refracted in the performing attitudes of his students — and reflects always in a new, individual, and inimitable light.
A musical tribute to Dmitry Smirnov is the idea of the benefit concert of the composer who will celebrate his fiftieth birthday this year. While firmly basing on the tradition, he still managed to create his own incomparable and identifiable style of choral composing, charming in its beauty and cantabile, able to give life to most ethereal and refined poetic images.
The harmonious and original world of compositions of Dmitry Smirnov puts a spell on you from the very first sounds. His music always find its way to the listener’s heart, getting there by invisible and elusive paths.
Remarkable choral ensembles of Petersburg will appear in the concert. You will hear the Youth Chamber Choir of St. Petersburg led by Yulia Khutoretskaya; the exquisite Chamber Choir Lege Artis, a child of Boris Abalian; and the Female Choir of The Rimsky–Korsakov Music College, from this year directed by Sergei Yekimov, a composer and a champion of choral music. It is the ensemble where Dmitry Smirnov started his artistic career both as conductor and composer.
Excellent French musicians Patricia Reibaud and Bertrand Giraud will appear in the third evening of our festival. Jointly with Petersburg musicians Adil Fyodorov, Dmitry Khrychev and the Nevsky String Quartet, they will present two monumental creations of French chamber repertoire. They are the Quartet To The End Of Time by Olivier Messiaen, a work containing deepest revelations of religious mysticism, and inspired, romantically passionate piano quartet of Cezar Franck. In 1974, Adil Fyodorov played in the Leningrad premiere of the Messiaen quartet. At that time, his partners were amazing Z. Vinnikov, B. Pergamenschikov and A. Ugorsky. Nearly thirty years after, he is re-interpreting the masterpiece of great composer of the 20th century, which was composed in 1941 (the ‘end of time’ era) in a camp for prisoners–of war. The fourth evening is granted to the German Lied and represented by Mitsuko Shirai and Hartmut Hoell. Every new meeting with this unique duo is a moment of genuine happiness for chamber music lovers. Winners of countless international awards for their performances and records, they have been tirelessly promoting for four decades and in all the five continents, works of Mozart and Beethoven, Schubert and Wolf, Schumann and Brahms, Richard Strauss and Mahler. They teach pupils at the world’s best music academies, and they record dozens of compact disks, many of which are recognized as reference models in the Lied art. We should look forward to witness the perfect musicianship and enchanting sense of music, surprising precision of performance and amazing freedom of music playing, and youthful devotion multiplied by immense experience of joint performances.
As has already become a tradition, the Gala Concert will bring together many of the Festival's musicians, multiplying the flavor of new discoveries, displaying covert areas of the chamber repertoire. The special guest of the “Evening” is Zeger Vandersteene, a remarkable Belgian singer and musician. Last year, Zeger presented to Petersburgers some of the bewitchingly sad songs of Henri Duparc. That was a very special concert, laden with subtlest melodic, stylistic, and poetic nuances. I am sure that the vocal pages of Gabriel Fore prepared for us by Zeger Vandersteene, the ones we have never heard so far, will not leave The Five Evenings’ guests indifferent this year either. Alexander Sandler who is to present his talented students in the first concert of the Festival will this time appear as a performer. We will hear his interpretation of the tremulous, wavering Sonata in E minor by Haydn and Schumann’s piano pieces.
To top the Gala Concert, the sparkling and witty Carnival of Animals will be played in the author's original version of Camille Saint-Saens. This ‘grand zoological fantasy’ will never lose its up–to– date quality, and the audience will once again hear melodies they know and love from their childhood.
Now, see you at “The Five Evenings 2002”, and see you again at “The Five Evenings” reunions in the forthcoming years.
Yuri Serov
Artistic Director, The Five Evenings Festival
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It is believed that the third year is a kind of milestone for any young festival. By such a date, a festival is expected to have secured a loyal set of interested audience and high-class performers, to have proven its serious artistic level and novel ideas, to have confirmed its managing abilities, and finally, to have made friends with financial partners. By its third anniversary, a festival either becomes a tradition or ceased to exist.
