On the 3rd September the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre opens its 142nd season. During the course of the year audiences can expect five premieres, a large-scale festival and ballet competition and a diverse touring programme.
At the first gathering of the company on the 26th August, the artistic director of the theatre, Teodor Currentzis announced:
‘The Perm theatre has today become an equal contender in the national and international world of opera and ballet theatre, and this means that in this new season we will have to work even harder than before. We thank the government of the Perm region for the support which it has given the theatre’.
‘For the last month we have been working on the first premiere of the season, the opera The Indian Queen. It has been a great honour for us to work with one of the most outstanding directors of our time — Peter Sellars. This has been a colossal experience for the participants of the production’.
The Perm Theatre of Opera and Ballet is opening the season with the final ballet premiere of the previous season — Romeo and Juliet, with choreography by Kenneth MacMillan. The ballet will be performed on the 3rd and 4th September.
On the 5th September there will be a gala-concert with performers numbering from the opera, ballet, symphony orchestra, as well as the choir and orchestra musicAeterna. The programme will include work from R. Wagner, G. Verdi, N.Rimsky-Korsakov, P. Tchaikovsky, C. Saint-Saens, L. Desyatnikov, I. Stravinsky and other composers.
The first premiere of the new season traditionally takes place at the end of September, and this year it is the baroque semi-opera by Henry Purcell, The Indian Queen, which the Perm theatre has been co-producing together with the Madrid theatre Teatro Real and the English National Opera. There will be a series of performances in Perm between the 25th and 29th September and also the 1st and 2nd October. European audiences will be able to see the opera in November, on the stage of the Teatro Real in Madrid.
The Opera club will meet for the first time at the beginning of the season to coincide with the greatly anticipated premiere of The Indian Queen. The meeting will take place in the theatre foyer on the 6th September at 6.30 p.m. Fans of the theatre and stage art will have a unique chance to interact with and ask questions to one of the most extraordinary directors of modern times, Peter Sellars, who has been in Perm for the last month working on the opera.
The evening will be moderated by Ilya Kukharenko, presenter from the television channel Culture. Those wishing to attend are advised to book a place in advance by telephone +7 (342) 212 92 44 or through the theatre website. There will also be an online streaming of the discussion with Peter Sellars through the website.
In October a busy touring season begins: the musicAeterna orchestra will be participating in the festival of art Ruhrtriennale in Germany.
The ballet troupe as usual will be leaving for Irelandand France, but also to a new destination for the Permdancers — Madrid, where they will be performing the ballets The Jester by S. Prokofiev and Les Noces by I. Stravinsky.
This autumn a new project is getting started in the theatre — a series of concert performances of operas which on the current stage would be impossible to perform in their entirety due to technological restrictions. The first concert performances will be from the R. Wagner opera The Flying Dutchman and the operetta The Batby J. Strauss.
There are five premieres planned for the duration of the 2013/14 season, two of which are renewed pieces that are already adored by our audiences. In October there will be an evening of choreography by Jerome Robbins, as a part of which the one-act ballets The Four Seasons and The Concert will be performed. And closer to the New Year young audiences will be awaiting the revival of the opera The Twelve Months by S. Banevich.
At the start of spring there will be a large-scale ballet premiere — the three-act ballet in the style of the famous French-Russian ballet master Victor Petipa, The Bluebird and the Princess Florina. The balletmaster of the Perm theatre Aleksei Miroshnichenko wrote the libretto, reworking a fairytale by the famous French writer of the 17th century, the Baroness d’Aulnoy. The story also has much in common with Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.
In April artists from around the world will come to the Perm theatre for the E. Maksimova Arabesque ballet competition. And at the end of June Perm awaits the 8th Diaghilev Festival, during which there will be a world premiere of Dmitry Kurlandsky’s opera Nosferatu, written on commission by the theatre, and also two ballet premieres, Jewels and Apollon Musagète by G. Balanchine.