At a season when lovers stroll the embankments at two in the morning to watch the drawbridges stretch up into the twilight sky, St Petersburg would be incomplete without romantic music, which the Stars of the White Nights Festival provides in full measure.
The festival was originally conceived as a celebration of Russian composers, performers and conductors, with an emphasis on the modern repertory. The heart of the festival remains true to this vision, though in recent years the festival has become increasingly international in scope, and provides ample space for the more general European classics.
Over the past twenty years, the music world has seen the creation of a good many chamber ensembles dedicated to what is commonly described as Early Music. This usually means pre-classical and pre-Romantic music.
The Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia illustrates a curiously precise reversal of this trend. Originating from a music society formed in Rome in 1566, the Academy is one of the oldest musical establishments in the world.
But when they play in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic as part of the Stars of White Nights festival, they won't be sporting viols, sackbuts or crumhorns. They will carry instruments of the modern orchestra, and they will play music from the Romantic heart of the 19th century.
Kristian Tilemann leads the orchestra in two concerts this week (Thursday and Friday, June 22 and 23). In the first, the orchestra will play the overture to Verdi's "Luisa Miller," and Schumann's Symphony No 4, which the composer originally considered labeling "Fantaisie symphonique," in a curious paraphrase of Berlioz. Pianist Andrea Luccezini takes the spotlight in Schumann's Concerto in A minor.
The second program includes the overture to Rossini's "Semiramide," and Schumann's Symphony No 1, written during the first year of the composer's marriage to Clara Wieck (the daughter of Schumann's piano teacher), and bubbling with the happiness the newlyweds must have shared. Maurizio Giannini is the featured soloist in the Mozart B-flat major piano concerto.
Ravil Martynov, principal conductor of the St Petersburg State Orchestra, is a frequent interpreter of 20th-century music, whether of such "classics" (if we may use the term of such a recent epoch) as Schoenberg, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, or of composers writing in Russia today. But Martynov is versatile, and joins the feast of musical romance with a program on June 24.
A father-son piano duo, Alexander Slobodnik, Sr and Jr, will play Mendelssohn's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra. The program also includes Mendelssohn's fairy-tale music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the overture to Mozart's "Don Giovanni," and Chopin's Variations on a theme from Mozart's opera. This last piece was Chopin's Opus 2, and prompted the celebrated remark in a review by Schumann, "Hats off, gentlemen -- a genius!"
Valery Gergiyev conducts orchestra, chorus and soloists from the Mariinsky Theater in Beethoven's Symphony No 9 in the Great Hall (June 26). Beethoven wrote his first eight symphonies in a period of some 13 years (1799-1812), but didn't compose his ninth until after a gap of nearly as long a period, in 1823.
Beethoven returned to the symphonic medium as the fittest means of realizing his long-cherished dream of setting Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy," a paean to universal peace and brotherhood, to music. "Schiller," wrote a contemporary, "was educated for a surgeon; but fate said to him, `No, there are deeper sores than those of the body -- heal thou the deeper!' So he became a poet and author."
Putting on the Beethoven Ninth is a workout, but Gergiyev and the Mariinsky orchestra are back on the Great Hall stage the very next day (June 27) with the overture to Wagner's "Parsifal," Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 5 in E minor, and the Brahms Violin Concerto with soloist Viktor Tretyakov. Gergiyev's interpretation of the Tchaikovsky Fifth elicits the tension and drama inherent in the music, without misshaping it.
Tretyakov has been concertizing some thirty years since taking the gold medal in the Third International Tchaikovsky Competition. In wrestling with Brahms, he isn't just resting on his laurels. The Brahms concerto is one of the Big Four (with Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Tchai-kovsky) -- the traditional touchstones of the professional solo violinist's artistry.
Funding for the festival is provided in part by St Petersburg Bank, Promstroybank, the Nevskij Palace Hotel, Radio Modern, the daily Smena, the Conti Casino, and Paulig.