Photo credit: George Grantham Bain Collection / commons.wikimedia.org
The anniversary of Igor Stravinsky is celebrated on Friday, June 17, TASS reports. 140 years have passed since the birth of the famous composer.
The anniversary festival has started today at the Mariinsky Theatre, it will combine the composer's symphonic works and ballets to his music staged as part of Diaghilev's Russian Seasons.
The theater's symphony orchestra will be the first to take the stage. It will perform "The Rite of Spring" and "The Wedding." The place at the conductor's stand will be taken by Valery Gergiev.
The Rite of Spring and The Wedding ballet, staged by Vaclav and Bronislava Nijinsky, will be shown on June, 19. The festival program will include two more ballets by Igor Stravinsky - The Firebird and Petrushka directed by Fokine. These works are called "Russian."
Stravinsky's work has a special significance for the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra. Its repertoire includes not only ballets, but also many works of the composer's foreign period.
The program dedicated to Stravinsky's anniversary was prepared by the Svetlanov State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia. The concert will be conducted by Alexander Lazarev at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. The musicians will perform the full version of the Firebird ballet. The program will be complemented by the music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Sergei Prokofiev.
Igor Stravinsky was born near St. Petersburg into a musical family. He started playing music since childhood. Even while studying at the Faculty of Law, he devoted all his time to studying music.
In the early 1900s, Stravinsky became close friends with Sergei Diaghilev and members of the World of Art association.
The composer and his family left Russia in 1914, lived in Switzerland, in France, then moved overseas. In the United States, he taught at Harvard University. Stravinsky died in 1971 in New York and was buried in Venice.
Russkiy Mir
