The 143rd Season of the Perm State Theatre of Opera and Ballet will open on 19 August with a brilliant evening of ballet entitled A Century of Dance: Stravinsky and Balanchine.
The 2014/15 season will include three operatic premieres: Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman and Borodin’s Prince Igor.
The first premiere of the Season will take place in September: Don Giovanni marks the completion of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy in Perm under the musical direction of Maestro Teodor Currentzis. Premiere performances are scheduled for 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27 and 28 September.
Perm Opera’s project to stage the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, coupled with the stunning success of musicAeterna’s first release, The Marriage of Figaro, on Sony Classical, has given rise to the notion of a «Perm Mozart» phenomenon among Russian critics. Whilst ensuring that all three operas are unified musically, Teodor Currentzis entrusted the staging to very different directors, in order to present the audience with different approaches to staging operas by one and the same composer and librettist.
Don Giovanni will be staged by Argentinian director Valentina Carrasco, a member of the famous Catalan theatre group «La Fura dels Baus», The Tales of Hoffman, scheduled for end January 2015, will be staged by Katerina Evangelatos, a Greek graduate from theRussianUniversity of Theatre Arts (GITIS), class of Leonid Heifetz. Both operas will be under musical direction of Teodor Currentzis.
In March Borodin’s Prince Igor returns to the stage of Perm Opera, staged by Sigrid T’Hooft (Belgium), under the baton of Valery Platonov. Sigrid T’Hooft, an expert in historical theatre, is the perfect person to take on the challenge of a historical adaptation of the first 1890 Mariinsky Theatre performance, which Teodor Currentzis intends to present toPerm audiences.
New ballet productions this Season include a triptych entitled Winter Dreams, a concept proposed by chief choreographer and balletmaster Alexei Miroshnichenko.
Winter Dreams presents three generations of British choreography: Sir Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs to music by G. Meyerbeer (1937), Sir Kenneth Macmillan’s Winter Dreams based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, to music by Tchaikovsky (1991) and a new work, When Snow Was Falling commissioned by the Perm Ballet from the contemporary choreographer Douglas Lee.
In May Alexei Miroshnichenko will present two satirical works by Dmitrii Shostakovitch: the Prelude to an opera entitled Orango which Shostakovitch never completed, and an opera-ballet entiteld Hypothetically Murdered. For many years considered lost, the prelude to Orango was discovered in 2004 in the archives of the Glinka Museum. Hypothetically Murdered was staged inRussia in 1931 at theLeningradMusic Hall and was first performed outsideRussia in 2013 inLucerne. The idea of returning these works to the stage was generously suggested by the composer’s widow, Irina Shostakovitch. This sensational premiere will open the Diaghilev Festival on 22 May 2015.
This Season we will also present a new work for younger audiences: commissioned by the theatre, the composer Pyotr Pospelov is writing an opera based on the nonsense poems of Edward Lear. The work is being staged by directors Vyacheslav Ignatov and Maria Litvinova (Moscow). Bringing together puppetry, shadow puppetry, dramatic and musical genres, Ignatov and Litvinova create the atmosphere of a cosy home theatre, where children learn about the most important things in life.
The new season will also see the continuation of the cycle of concert performances of operas from: Weinberg’s The Passenger, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Tosca, Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades and Iolantha.
In the first half of May 2015 we will celebrate the 175th anniversary of the birth of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, whose name the Perm Theatre bears. This will be followed by the ninth International Diaghilev Festival (22 to 30 May 2015). The programmes of both festivals will be announced in the Autumn.
Marc de Mauny, General Manager of the Perm State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre:
«The main priority for our theatre is to achieve and maintain the highest possible quality of music making. We are perhaps the only musical theatre in Russia, if not in Europe, which for which the quality of music making is the top priority. This principle applies not only to new productions and to concerts, it applies equally to all repertoire operas and ballets, which means dedicating more time to the rehearsal process. This will inevitably lead to a decrease in the number of performances overall but as a result each performance will be properly prepared from every point of view and we will produce truly world-class theatre throughout the Season».
The 143rd season will see around 60 chamber and 20 symphonic concerts, including all of the Beethoven symphonies, selected works by Haydn, Schumann, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Dvorak, Rameau and many other composers.
During the Season the theatre will be tour to both Russian and European cities: to Yekaterinburg in September;Moscowin October, December and February;St. PetersburgandQatarin November; and toFrancein January. MusicAeterna will tour Europe with concerts inAthens, BrusselsandHelsinkiin March.
In June the ballet has a week-long residency presenting Romeo and Juliet in Bolognaand in July the musicAeterna choir will participate in the Aix-en-Provencefestival, presenting two concerts of works by Stravinsky and as the chorus in two opera productions of the festival: Alcina by Handel and Die Entführung aus dem Serail by Mozart.