Swan Lake will open the 146th theatre season. On August 30 and 31 the theatre will present the renewed version of the ballet staged in 2015. The first premiere of the new season is scheduled for November. It will be children’s show-concert Octopus’s Garden. Theatre plans include productions of Romeo Castellucci, Alexei Ratmansky, Alexei Miroshnichenko, Vincent Dumestre and other captivating projects.
The first premiere of the season is the show-concert for children Octopus’s Garden directed by Maria Litvinova and Vyacheslav Ignatov. It will be their second work in Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre. In 2014 they staged an opera-quest in the theatre foyer Journey to the land of Jumblies by Petr Pospelov, that got The Golden Mask award. The new show of this creative duet will be premiered in November.
Ballet Premieres
The first ballet premiere will be held in December. World acclaimed Spanish choreographer Goyo Montero, who has been successfully running the ballet company in Nurnberg since 2008, will stage a performance Asunder to the music of Wagner and Chopin. His choreographic style can be defined as a synthesis of classic and contemporary dance. The world premiere of the work will be presented on November 13, 14 and 19 at the festival of contemporary dance CONTEXT. Diana Vishneva. In Perm the performance will be presented in December — on the same day with the revival of William Forsythe’s ballet The Second Detail.
Just before New Year, the theatre will show the second ballet premiere — Tchaikovsky ‘s The Nutcracker in the version of the principal ballet master of the theatre Alexei Miroshnichenko. The story will be set in Petersburg of 1892, the year this ballet was actually premiered in Mariinsky Theatre.
Alexei Miroshnichenko:
—It will be a classical version of The Nutcracker, and this is where its complication lies. When you stage a contemporary version of a classical ballet, you feel quite free in your interpretation. In our case I am highly restricted with the classical form that should be preserved. But I also want to make some musical and story discoveries.
In March Alexei Ratmansky will stage Leonid Desyatnikov’s ballet Opera. The world premiere was in 2014 in La Scala. Towards the end of the season another choreographic performance will be presented and that will be the ballet Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov, staged by Alexei Miroshnichenko.
Opera Premieres
In March Benjamin Lazar will present his version of the opera Phaeton by Jean Baptist Lully. The project is being prepared in cooperation with the theatre department of the Versailles. The combined orchestra of Le Poeme Harmonique and musicAeterna and the international cast of soloists will take part in the project.
Premiere of the oratorio Jeanne d’Arc as bucher by Arthur Honegger will open the Diaghilev Festival 2018. An Italian director Romeo Castellucci, who works in an innovative and often radical visual and sound aesthetic, will stage the piece. His works cause a lot of polemics but they never leave people indifferent. Jeanne d’Arc as bucher will be created in cooperation with Lyon Opera.
The Diaghilev Festival
The XII International Diaghilev Festival will take place in Perm from July 14 to 24, 2018. Besides Jeanne d’Arc as bucher the preliminary programme of the Festival includes choreographic production of Alain Platel’s Nicht shlafen and the world premiere that was performed by the company les ballets C de la B at the RUHRtriennale in 2016; ensemble from Gent B’Rock and Belgian ensemble graindelavoix. The closing day of the festival will be marked with the traditional performance of the works by Gustav Mahler: the fourth symphony and songs from Des knaben Wunderhorn played by the Festival orchestra led by Teodor Currentzis.
Teodor Currentzis, artistic director of the theatre:
— We continue our work and keep the mission but in a more intensifying way. On the one hand we keep the tradition, but as Mahler said «tradition means passing on the fire rather than worshipping the ashes». So, therefore, we are making a step forward exploring new grounds of the contemporary theatre. We will show classical, modern and beyond modernity producations. The main thing is that all of them are high quality projects. In short, we managed to programme the most interesting and high quality things in different genres and we will show them to our audience.
Touring
Immediately after the triumphal performance at the Salzburg Festival, musicAeterna orchestra and choir conducted by Teodor Currentzis went for their big European tour to present Mozart’s Requiem and La Clemenza di Tito. The end of December is scheduled for the first big Russian tour of the orchestra during which the musicians will perform the Seventh symphony by Shostakovich in Perm, Tyumen, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg. The ballet company of the theatre will go to Bahrain to present the ballet Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev.
Concerts
After the European tour of the orchestra and choir musicAeterna there will be the whole sequence of concert programmes. On October 21 musicAeterna orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis will perform the first symphony of Prokofiev composed in 1917 — intentionally «classical» piece, that in a surprising way didn’t match the epoch, and the Ninth symphony of Prokofiev — an extraordinary combination of laughter and grief that revealed a new deeper view on the world trauma and ways of its recovery.
In October there will be a concert version of the opera Ruslan and Ludmila by Glinka, performed by the soloists of the opera company, opera choir, musicAeterna choir and the Big Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrey Danilov. In spring the principle conductor of the theatre Valery Platonov will present the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky as a concert version performed by the Big Symphony Orchestra.
Other projects of the theatre
In the 146th season Laboratory of the Modern Audience will continue its work. The educational season will start in September. The first cycle of the classes will be about the concert performance of Ruslan and Ludmila.
In October the new project Legends of Perm Theatre will introduce meetings and concerts devoted to artists who used to work in Perm theatre in different periods.raditional project Opera Extreme that opens all the doors of theatre for the audience, will be held in November.
In April 2018 the theatre will invite ballet admirers to enjoy the Open Russian ballet competition Arabesque named after Ekaterina Maximova, artistic director of which is the legendary ballet dancer of the Bolshoi theatre Vladimir Vasiliev. The upcoming competition will have its thirtieth anniversary since its first organization.