Rodion Shchedrin’s 80th birthday

“Shchedrin’s works are classics of contemporary music, and we cannot fail to honour his jubilee properly.  We play a great deal of Shchedrin’s music— and almost all of his theatrical pieces.  And I believe that it has been an incredible blessing and extremely instructive for the Mariinsky artists to work with a composer who lives right alongside us.  This is a tradition at the Mariinsky Theatre. The Shchedrin Jubilee is a cause for rejoicing and a great event for all Russian musicians.”

Valery Gergiev

On December 24^th and 25^th in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev will offer concerts in honour of Rodion Shchedrin’s 80^th birthday.  These concerts will be part of the “Russian Winter” Festival.  Two concerts are given in homage to Rodion Shchedrin, an outstanding composer of our time who will celebrate his 80^th birthday in December.  Rodion Shchedrin’s works have long been classics of contemporary music in Russia and all over the world.  He is one of the most eagerly sought out composers of our age and one of the most performed and most published.  In recent years Shchedrin has been a “composer with a special affinity for the Mariinsky Theatre” in that so many of his works have been performed on the concert and opera stage by Maestro Valery Gergiev, some of them for the first time.

The Moscow concerts duplicate two concerts in Saint Petersburg that the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra with Valery Gergiev conducting will present on the 22^nd and 23^rd of December.  In the dramatic scene “Cleopatra and the Snake” Veronika Dzhioeva will take the solo part.

Programme: