Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer Dmitry Shostakovich, considered far and wide to be the most important figure in Russian music of the 20th century. In celebration, both the Bolshoi Theater and the Moscow Philharmonic have scheduled events of unusual interest, in each case led by a distinguished conductor closely associated with the composer prior to his death in 1975.
The Bolshoi's tribute on Monday will be a performance of the opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". Although this staging, which made its debut two seasons ago, hardly ranks among the theater's most inspired efforts of recent years, the opera's score is likely to receive a memorable reading with the presence in the pit of conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, a longtime champion of Shostakovich's music, who returns to the Bolshoi for the first time since his acrimonious resignation as its artistic director five years ago.
The Bolshoi will also honor Shostakovich over the coming week with a reprise of its unique and brilliantly re-created repertoire of all three of the composer's ballets, "The Golden Age", "Bolt" and "The Bright Stream".
Simultaneously with the Bolshoi's "Lady Macbeth" – and no doubt hotly competing with it for an audience of Moscow's elite – the Philharmonic celebrates Monday's anniversary with a concert by the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. This, too, marks an important return, with famed cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich making his first Moscow appearance since 1998. A year after his last Moscow concert, Rostropovich led the world premiere in Samara of composer Sergei Slonimsky's opera "The Visions of Ioann the Terrible". In the wake of a mostly hostile critical reception, Rostropovich vowed never again to appear publicly in Russia. Though he has occasionally broken that vow elsewhere in the country, only the importance of paying homage to his revered one-time mentor and colleague has apparently proved sufficient incentive to bring him once again before a Moscow audience.
For his program, Rostropovich has chosen two Shostakovich works that had their very first performances given by the same orchestra he conducts on Monday, and in the same hall as well: the Symphony No. 8, dating from 1943, which the composer looked upon as his requiem to honor the dead of World War II, and the Violin Concerto No. 1, with Viktor Tretyakov as soloist, which premiered in 1955.
The Philharmonic's Shostakovich celebrations continue until late December with some 19 more orchestral and chamber concerts devoted to the composer's music.
In October, the Russian National Orchestra – arguably Russia's finest symphonic ensemble – makes a pair of appearances at the Conservatory, playing the first and last of Shostakovich's 15 symphonies under the baton of artistic director Mikhail Pletnev, and then a program led by the extraordinarily talented young Russian-born, London-based maestro Vladimir Yurovsky that includes incidental music for Shakespeare's "Hamlet", a pair of song cycles and the composer's Symphony No. 6.
The Tchaikovsky Concert Hall becomes the venue for October's three remaining orchestral concerts. First to be heard – with conductor Vladimir Fedoseyev, the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Conservatory Chamber Choir and bass Sergei Aleksashkin, a star of St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater – will be Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, a work that sets to music the profoundly moving poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko written to commemorate the World War II massacre of Kiev's Jewish population in the ravine of Babi Yar.
Completing the October agenda are a program selected from Shostakovich's vast output of music for Soviet films, played by the Russian State Symphony Orchestra of Cinematography, and another that includes the composer's popular Symphony No. 5, interpreted by the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia under the baton of its music director, Mark Gorenshtein.
In November, Rozhdestvensky takes up the baton again, this time leading the State Symphonic Capella of Russia at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in yet another work that sets to music the poems of Yevtushenko, "The Execution of Stenka Razin", together with a suite of tunes composed for a 1931 vaudeville show called "Hypothetically Dead".
For December, the Philharmonic offers a pair of concerts by the Novaya Rossiya Symphony Orchestra: The first, at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, is to be led by the composer's son, Maxim Shostakovich, and features the monumental wartime "Leningrad" Symphony; the second, at the Conservatory, takes place under the baton of Yury Bashmet, with Tretyakov appearing as soloist in the Violin Concerto No. 2. The festivities conclude at the Conservatory on Dec. 25 with a performance of the Symphony No. 14 by the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater under the direction of its noted leader, Valery Gergiev.
The highlight of the of the Philharmonic's Shostakovich chamber music series will be a complete traversal of the composer's 15 string quartets, played in the Small Hall of the Conservatory by the world-renowned Borodin Quartet.
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