A Festival Begins in Nizhny

Tomorrow the 5th A. D. Sakharov International Arts Festival will open in the Kremlin Concert Hall of the Nizhny Novgorod Philharmonic. It will last exactly a week.

The first concert is given by guests, the chamber orchestra “Soloists of Moscow” with its famous leader and soloist Yuri Bashmet (viola) and the soloist-pianist Alexander Melnikov. The Muscovites’ programme is solid classics: Mozart, Haydn and our great contemporary and compatriot D. D. Shostakovich (String Quartet No. 13, orchestrated for viola and string orchestra by the Moscow composer Alexander Tchaikovsky). This severe beginning serves as a prelude to the whole festival: no finery, great deep music prevails.

The concerts are given a festive quality by the ringing names of the performers. In each of the ten evenings a star of the first magnitude will perform: Mstislav Rostropovich, the Borodin Quartet, the conductor Saulius Sondeckis with his “St Petersburg Camerata”, the violinist Dora Schwarzberg and the tenor Sergei Larin. The Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Nizhny Novgorod Philharmonic with the conductors Vladimir Ziva and Alexander Skulsky is involved in the concerts twice.

On one of the evenings the chamber choir “Nizhny Novgorod”, the choir school’s chapel with the conductor Lev Sivukhin and the chamber orchestra “Sofia” (conductor Sofia Propishchan) will perform. Both choirs with L. Sivukhin also take part in the closing of the festival, in the performance of S. I. Taneyev’s cantata “The Monument” to words by A. S. Pushkin.

There is no need to name all the composers whose music will be performed. Without exaggeration, these are spiritual treasures that help us to be human in such a complex and harsh world.

Valentina Blinova, June 1998