St. Petersburg is alive with the auguries of the approach of Christmas: the New Year's Tree near the DLT department store is lit up; gift-wrapping tables have begun operating at Gostiny Dvor; and those tram-drivers who still announce each approaching stop do so in a voice markedly huskier than usual.
It is also the season of the annual International "Christmas Musical Meetings in the Northern Palmyra" Festival, running from December 23 to January 12.
Comprising more than 60 events playing in 15 of the city's concert halls, this year's festival welcomes guest artists from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Mongolia, the Netherlands, and the United States.
The festival includes performances by many of the musical ensembles from St Petersburg, or the Northern Palmyra as some call it. Guest ensembles include the Renaissance Chamber Orchestra of Early and Contemporary Music (from Stavropol), the Tatarstan Republic National Symphony, the B-A-C-H Ekaterinburg Municipal Chamber Orchestra, and the Kovchek Men's Sacred Music Ensemble (from Nizhny Novgorod). Concerts begin at 7 pm unless otherwise noted.
The festival opens on December 23 in the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia, with an all-Prokofiev program. Soloist Anton Barakhovsky performs the First Violin Concerto, Opus 19, and the amassed forces of the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Choir of the St Petersburg (Rimsky-Korsakov) Conservatory, the Boys' Choir of the Glinka Music School, soloists Larisa Lyadkova (mezzo-soprano) and Mikhail Kit (bass), and reader Nikolai Marton present the oratorio "Ivan the Terrible." The program repeats the following day.
Oleg Maisenberg gives a piano recital in the Grand Hall on December 24 (4 pm), performing Liszt's Variations on a Theme from Bach's Cantata No. 113, Ravel's "Miroirs," and Musorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." This last piece is so famous in Ravel's brilliant orchestration that one is apt to forget that it was originally a piano suite.
At the Herzen Pedagogical University (on the Moika a stone's throw from the Stroganov Palace), also at 4 pm on the 24th, the Classica State Symphony Orchestra of St Petersburg will present a program of overtures to Italian operas, including works by Rossini (the man the French called "Monsieur Crescendo,") Verdi, Mascagni and Puccini.
Should you find yourself in Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) at 6:00pm on Christmas Eve, pianist Alexander Wildau is giving a recital in the concert hall on the palace grounds. The program includes works by Ravel, Liszt, Stravinsky and Skryabin.
In the Grand Hall on Christmas Day, the Lege Artis chamber choir and the St Petersburg Camerata orchestra of the State Hermitage will perform the first half of J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio. As the Christmas Oratorio comprises six of Bach's sacred cantatas (of which he wrote more than a hundred), half the Oratorio is quite a concert.
The St Petersburg Glinka Capella presents an exquisite program on December 29, which includes Debussy's "Sacred and Profane Dances" for harp and chamber orchestra, and a suite from Ravel's ballet "Daphnis et Chloe," two masterpieces of musical Impressionism.
On December 29 at Dom Kompozitorov, the Kovchev Men's Choir from Nizhny Novgorod presents "Bless the Lord, O My Soul," a program of sacred music from the Russian Orthodox tradition. Dostoyevsky once claimed that beauty would save the world. The Russian Orthodox men's choir, one of the gems of world music, amply bears him out.
At 6 pm, December 27, at the Rimsky-Korsakov Apartment Museum, Professor Natan Perelman will observe his 90th birthday -- at the piano.