The symphonic evening with the musicAeterna Orchestra is dedicated to Italy depicted in Tchaikovsky's compositions. The most cosmopolitan of the Russian composers of the 19th century, Tchaikovsky travelled extensively throughout his life in Europe, by 1880 having managed to visit the Italian Peninsula three times. The very nature of his talent is more "Italian" than "German": Tchaikovsky appreciates open-hearted emotions and expressiveness of melody, saturates abstract symphonic genres with theatrical drama, and values success with the public higher than the approval of critics. The concert programme encompasses three of his opuses related to Italy musically or in terms of the plot.
 
The symphonic fantasy "Francesca da Rimini" coexists in Tchaikovsky's creative biography with "Swan Lake" and "Eugene Onegin" - all three compositions are united by the theme of the doomed love. The composer came about with the conception of "Francesca" on his way to Bayreuth for the premiere of "The Ring of the Nibelung"; Tchaikovsky later agreed with critics about Wagner's influence on his score. In the story of Paolo and Francesca, the composer is interested in its dramatic potential in the first place. Tchaikovsky is not prone to abstract searches for sound colour, he is emotionally involved in the chosen plot, emphasizing in it the acuteness of the conflict and the depth of feelings of the characters. Saint-Saens placed "Francesca" musically above Liszt's "Dante Symphony", and cellist Karl Davydov, to whom the author would later dedicate his "Capriccio Italien", called the fantasy "the greatest work of our time." 

In December 1879, Tchaikovsky found himself in Rome during the carnival and, impressed by what he saw, decided to compose "something of the kind of Glinka's Spanish fantasies." A few months later, the score of the "Capriccio Italien" was ready. It indeed succeeds to Glinka's Spanish diptych in many ways – from the details of form and orchestration to the general treatment of the "national" in the vein of entertaining exoticism. Tchaikovsky in "Capriccio" looks at the Mediterranean with a tourist gaze: this is a paradise land where there are no sorrows, struggles and dramas, and sounds radiate joy, light, and serenity. "There is hardly any other composition in Russian classical music which contains not a single atom of gloom," as one of the reviewers summed up after the premiere.
 
The fantasy overture "Romeo and Juliet" is the only major symphonic composition by Tchaikovsky that does not have an opus number. Tchaikovsky could consider the overture not entirely his composition - since Balakirev's role in its creation, in fact, is teetering on the verge of co-authorship. It was Balakirev (to whom the overture is dedicated) who offered Tchaikovsky the plot, the tonal plan, the main images and even specific pictorial solutions ("fierce Allegro with saber strokes"), and his criticism forced Tchaikovsky to compose whole sections of the form anew, from the entrée to the outro. In "Romeo and Juliet" Tchaikovsky for the first time found his personal formula of symphonic drama: fatal images of doom, sharp contrasts, emotional waves, lyrics isolated and detached from the surrounding storms, tragic denouement of conflict, and ambiguous triumph. And also for the first time in his life he ascended to the top of melodic expressiveness - in the famous theme of love, which Rimsky-Korsakov later recognized as "one of the best themes of all Russian music."

Nocturnal enigma concerts at the Perm Art Gallery are one of the Diaghilev Festival traditions that define its atmosphere. Under the gallery dome amidst Permian gods — the unique wooden sculptures — music sounds: what kind of music it is becomes known only after the programme has been performed. In the meantime, the twilight in the hall gradually gives way to light, and immediately after the concert the audience can come out on the Kama River bank to meet the dawn.

The "Baroque Gala" does not attempt to cover the entire century and a half era in one evening. The concert programme offers us just one, but an extremely important perspective: an insight into the Italian branch of the High Baroque and its two main achievements — opera seria and instrumental concert style.
Opera, or melodramma seria, was a moralistic, sublime, and cruel art. In its plots there acted rulers, gods, and heroes, love conflicted with honour and duty, and virtue was always rewarded. In the first half of the 18th century, such operas were staged all over Europe, from London to Lisbon and St. Petersburg — almost exclusively for the entertainment of a narrow circle of the highest nobility. Monarchs competed with each other in the wealth and luxury of their court theatrical productions. Star performers — singers, castrati and prima donnas, earned as much as the Hollywood actors, and commoners, whose taxes, labour, and sometimes blood paid for all this splendour, happened to beat famous artists when they met them in the streets.

Virtuosos encouraged composers to write music that was increasingly sophisticated technically; in some arias, vocal coloratura would not fall short of the frantic sound cascades of violin parts in complexity. The singers also were required to be able to improvise. Changing the melody when repeating it, showing off in cadences — all this was and still is a model of vocal prowess and one of the main subjects for the listener of baroque music. The soloist in the opera was obliged to show a wide range of emotions, for which the composer provided him with a proper number of arias in various moods — fury, heroic pathos, love lyrics, sorrow, and exhilaration. As a result, three-part arias da capo (almost all the numbers in the concert are of this type) turned out to be the most important vocal form of the time; composers of Handel's or Scarlatti's level composed more than a thousand such arias each in the course of their career.

A German who spent most of his life in England, Handel was at the same time one of the major representatives of the Italian style, and his works naturally occupy the central place in the evening's programme. Arias from his operas were written during the triumphant London period, when a superstar trio — castrato Senesino, Francesca Cuzzoni, and Faustina Bordoni sang in the performances of the Royal Academy of Music headed by Handel. These give way to arias from English-language oratorios written later, when Italian opera in England went out of fashion and was cast into oblivion for a couple of centuries. Its style and methods, however, continued to live in a new guise — in the aria of Deyanira from the oratorio "Hercules", Handel transforms the da capo form into a dramatic scene and anticipates the scenes of madness from the bel canto operas of the 19th century.

Besides arias, the only purely instrumental compositions in the programme also belong to Antonio Vivaldi. Among them there is a concert from the collection "L'estro armonico" — perhaps the most influential collection of instrumental music in the 18th century. And next to them there are the arias of the composers of "the second rate", whose music, in fact, is no weaker than the music of recognized stars: its harmonic experiments are no less bold, the vocal parts are no less puzzling, and the orchestra sounds with the same lyrical or wrathful force. Italian music is direct and sensual; it resists distanced listening and irresistibly draws us into its emotional orbit. Perhaps this is where the secret of its popularity is hidden, the popularity that is not ceasing even now, 300 years later.

At the Diaghilev Festival–2023, the musicAeterna4 vocal ensemble with the participation of the Greek instrumentalist, master of the classical Cretan lyra Yiorgos Kaloudis presents a new programme of Western European music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Its title, taken from the song of the great English composer John Dowland "Come Again ... Sweet Love", elegantly alludes not only to the main theme of the programme — earthly love as a reflection of heavenly love — but also to its circular structure.

The vocal cycle opens with the earliest Western European hymns whose authorship we know: these are “Kyrie Eleison” and “O Virtus Sapientiae” of Saint Hildegard von Bingen – a visionary, a writer, an extraordinarily independent composer and an active abbess of the 12th century. Other early polyphonic medieval works are anonymous: the very institution of authorship was of no importance to the monks-musicians who combined new motifs, texts, and rhythms with old, well-known Gregorian chorales or folk melodies. We know their motets and virelais by the names of the codices — manuscripts in which they were recorded (often between other records of the monastic household needs and, as a rule, much later than these works had been created). The Spanish Codex Las Huelgas, the Catalan Ell Llibre Vermell, the French Codex Montpellier, forgotten for hundreds of years and found in the 19th century, serve as inexhaustible sources of music of the 13th century, in which the spiritual and the secular were often mixed literally, vertically (when three or four voices simultaneously sang three or four different texts, including spiritual hymns on Latin, and love songs in national languages).

The polyphonic and one-voiced compositions of the most important medieval author that is known to us — the poet and composer of the 14th century Guillaume de Machaut — serve as a kind of bridge to a new era, when it became customary to sign musical works with the name of the composer. However, the opuses of "folk" origin – popular songs and dances, like the famous English ballad "Greensleeves" or the French tourdion “Quand je bois du vin clairet” — still remained anonymous and allowed the publication of many textual and musical variations. As for the opuses of John Dowland, Thomas Tallis, Orlando di Lasso or Claudin de Sermisy, published in collections or transmitted in handwritten lists, such liberties were no longer permissible.

Reaching the pinnacle of Renaissance polyphony, the musicAeterna4 concert programme turns back to Guillaume de Machaut and anonymous music of the 13th century, as if saying: "Come again ...". Thus, the medieval sound supported by the tangy timbre of the Cretan lyra in the hands of Yiorgos Kaloudis will be fixed in the focus of the performers' attention and in the listeners' memory.

musicAeterna4 is an a capella vocal ensemble created in 2012 by the artists of the musicAeterna choir who have mastered not only academic, but also pop/jazz vocal technique. Their repertoire is based on original arrangements of folk songs (Russian, Gypsy, Greek, Tatar, Spanish, etc.), works by contemporary composers, arrangements of jazz and blues compositions from Broadway musicals and movie soundtracks.

Yiorgos Kaloudis is a cellist, classical cretan lyra performer, improviser, composer. As a classical Cretan lyra player, Yiorgos Kaloudis has released seven albums, and performed solo concerts at the Megaron Hall in Athens, at festivals of early, academic, and jazz music in different European countries and in Russia, collaborated with orchestras including the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra and the Lege Artis Chamber Choir in St. Petersburg, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Thessaloniki. At this time, with the scientific supervision of the University of Crete, he works on the musical research project: “Publication of a teaching method of Classical Cretan Lyra and application of modern technological means in its interpretation”. Among Kaloudis' creative partners are mezzo soprano Irini Tsirakidis, pianist Dimitra Kokkinopoulou, actress of ancient drama Sophia Hill, as well as the ensembles Thesis Trio and musicAeterna4.

Jazzayris is a musical project featuring several North African musical styles based on the richness of Algerian traditional music and its various styles – from Algiers to Oran via Mostaganem and Adrar. Hassan and Khalil act as ambassadors of their country. Their project is designed to awaken memories of the ancient myths of Algeria, expressed in countless stories of happiness and grief, joy and passion.

Artur Gazarov is a Moscow percussionist, a long-term collaborator of Leonid Agutin, an adept of world music and Latin American jazz styles. Khalil Ruazmi plays saxophone, drums, guitar and a guembri — Maghreb bass lute, which is chiseled out of a log, covered with camel skin and supplemented with three strings of goat veins. Hassan Belkacem Benaliua plays mandolin, violin and qanun, an Arabic zither whose origin dates back to Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. Ruazmi and Benaliua are both from Algeria (their cities are only 80 kilometers apart, an hour by car), but they first met in Moscow, where they arrived to master the "western" musical practice. Ruazmi is studying jazz in the Russian capital. Benaliua is honing his cello technique: two years ago he won the Prokofiev International Competition.

The music played by the trio could most accurately be defined as world fusion — a free mix-up of various musical forms with a similar ethnic flavour. It is unlikely that any nation will agree to recognize this music as its own, but the collective is not claiming to follow the folklore tradition in the utmost rigour. Instead, they cultivate a kind of authenticity of hybridization. The North of Africa, from Tangier to the Sahara, is part of the Mediterranean, a giant melting pot that has served as a habitat for numerous ethnic groups whose cultures were layered and intertwined with each other from time immemorial. Assyria, Rome, Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire have left their mark there. The richest culture of Muslim Andalusia has been preserved there after the Reconquista. The 20th century brought there marching brass bands and jazz influences. The transfer of this background to the Russian scene also adds a couple of colours. Apparently, music has always been created this way: the rhythms, timbres and styles that were at hand formed a new picture each time. To contemplate this ever-changing sound kaleidoscope, the musical here-and-now is an important and often exciting listening experience.

Nocturnal enigma concerts at the Perm Art Gallery are one of the Diaghilev Festival traditions that define its atmosphere. Under the gallery dome amidst Permian gods — the unique wooden sculptures — music sounds: what kind of music it is becomes known only after the programme has been performed. In the meantime, the twilight in the hall gradually gives way to light, and immediately after the concert the audience can come out on the Kama River bank to meet the dawn.

Richard Wagner is one of the most influential composers in the history of music, a cultural hero, myth, and symbol, whose work and views still remain the subject of frenzied debate. Orchestral music belongs to his most indisputable creative achievements: the technical perfection and expressiveness of his instrumentation were recognized even by sceptically minded critics. Wagner was a reformer of the art of orchestration, as well as the founder of conducting practice in its modern form.

Opera overtures form a significant part of Wagner’s symphonic legacy. To the traditional genre of the introduction to the opera, he brings new ideas that have developed in the programmatic symphonic poems of the New German School. Wagner's overture is inseparable from the opera it precedes and it is not only due to their thematic connections. Anticipating the drama, it illustrates not its external events, but the key philosophical problems behind the plot: the conflict of carnal and spiritual love in "Tannhäuser", pessimism and ever-insatiable love longing in "Tristan", the outpouring of heavenly grace into the world in "Lohengrin"… The overtures included in the concert programme form a kind of synopsis of Wagner's mature work, a brief digest of the German heroic epic, which the composer developed all his life, borrowing motifs from chivalric novels, medieval legends, ancient myths, and historical chronicles.

The introduction to "Tristan and Isolde" is preceded by a new work by Alexey Retinsky, composed in the unique genre of "an overture to overture". Retinsky is approaching Wagner in his attention to orchestral colour and the mythological nature of artistic thinking. The title of his composition – "Water Has no Hair" – refers the audience to the romantic and symbolist circle of images, from Wagner's Rhine mermaids to Debussy-Maeterlinck's Melisande.

Nocturnal enigma concerts at the Perm Art Gallery are one of the Diaghilev Festival traditions that define its atmosphere. Under the gallery dome amidst Permian gods — the unique wooden sculptures — music sounds: what kind of music it is becomes known only after the programme has been performed. In the meantime, the twilight in the hall gradually gives way to light, and immediately after the concert the audience can come out on the Kama River bank to meet the dawn.

Greek composer and researcher Yiorgos Kaloudis will appear not only as a classical Cretan lyra player and a connoisseur of ancient music, but also as a contemporary non-academic composer. The interests and experience of Yiorgos Kaloudis in the field of jazz music and electronics allow him to create atmospheric canvases close to ambient music while preserving the archaic flair.

Enigma concert. The programme will be announced at the end of the concert.

A frequent participant of the Diaghilev festivals of the past years, multi-percussionist Petr Glavatskikh presents the project "Age 300". The project is dedicated to two 300-year anniversaries at once: the foundation of the city of Perm and the creation of "The Four Seasons" by Antonio Vivaldi - a composition that has become to represent the early music.

The concept of the evening is organized around the idea of time. The endless cyclical change of seasons is reflected here in the music of different eras. Traditional Perm folklore in the concert programme stands next to Baroque and modern compositions, giving a historical and cultural perspective to the current developments. Fragments from Vivaldi's "Seasons" enter into a dialogue with the percussion concerto of the end of the 20th century. The Marimba Concerto by Ney Rosauro, a Brazilian composer whose works for percussion have entered the standard repertoire, has been performed several thousand times around the world over half a century since its creation and, apparently, can be considered one of the most popular percussion compositions in history. Latin American rhythms serve as the basis for the music of the concerto - the same foundation for Vivaldi's concerto style was the Venetian rhythms of his time. The programme is complemented by solo compositions for percussion: "Black Clouds" for vibraphone by Edison Denisov, a classic of the Soviet avant-garde, and preludes dedicated to spring, autumn and winter by Petr Glavatskikh himself.

Together with the soloist, the Rosarium Chamber Orchestra and the creative association "Repey" take part in the concert.

Rosarium is a collective focused on the authentic performance of the 18th century music. It has been part of the Faculty of Historical and Contemporary Performance of Moscow Conservatory since the formation of the faculty in 1997 and last year presented a programme of works by Bach and Telemann at the Diaghilev Festival.

Creative Association Repey studies traditional musical culture and invents forms for its presentation in an urban environment. The soloists of Repey have mastered the South Russian style of singing, rare vocal, and instrumental techniques on Pan’s multi-barrel flutes — kugikles, paelyans, zorkas — and single-barrel flutes whistlers. All the flutes of the ensemble are made by the participants from giant umbelliferous and gramineous plants. The concert will include folklore material collected by the ensemble in expeditions around Perm Krai and the South of Russia.

The festival programme of the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME) is a short overview of the ways modern composers work with verbal text. The ensemble focuses on different tactics of interaction between the text, the soloist, and instrumentalists, as well as different types of texts set to music in the compositions of the leading authors of the generation of 50–year-olds. The three works performed by MCME form a paradoxical narrative about love and death. In this narrative, "high" and "low" genres have equal say, tension is softened by irony, and kitsch turns into palpitating lyrics.

Alexey Sysoev – a Moscow-based radical composer with a background of a jazz pianist, a taste for experimental electronics and non-academic vocals – appears as the author of a 2018 composition in which a baritone and an instrumental ensemble perform traditional solo and accompanying roles. It is the text that is unconventional here. Mon aimée, ma belle Irène is the full text of the suicide letter of the Russian poet and ethnographer, a member of the French Resistance Boris Vilde from a German prison, in which the expectation of execution is comprehended from the perspective of eternity and love: "Death for me is the realization of Great Love, it is entering the true reality."

The cycle of the Cypriot composer, musicAeterna resident Andreas Moustoukis set to the verses of Guillaume Apollinaire (premiered at St. Petersburg Dom Radio in February 2023) "dresses" classical poems about the autumn of the French avant-gardist, anarchist, aesthete, and founder of surrealism in a non-academic electronic percussion sound shell: "Leaves / Trampled as one / A train / That rolls on / Life / Is gone".

In the composition of the famous Russian-German composer, a member of the group SoMa Vladimir Rannev, This is Such a Love (2014), an anonymous text from the collection "Handwritten Girl's Story" by sociologist Sergey Borisov appears on the video screen, while the soloist only sighs along with the instrumental ensemble in time with the running lines, "singing over" the motives of Romeo and Juliet in a new way: «Victor fell to his knees. He throbbed, kissed Lena's portrait, but it was not enough, in the name of love he took out poison and drank it. “I'm sorry, Lena, I'm sorry for my negligence, I'm sorry for my incomplete love, Lena! I am dying in your name..."».

"The Soldier's Tale" is a rare example of the synthesis of music and drama theatre in the chamber genre. Seven instrumentalists, reciters and dancers, whose presence Stravinsky himself considered optional, should be in constant interaction on one small stage, while each has to act strictly within the framework of their art form. Interpreting this work is always a challenge for performers.

"The Soldier's Tale" is halfway from the Russian style of Igor Stravinsky's three great ballets ("The Firebird", "Petrushka" and "The Rite of Spring") to his neoclassical masterpieces of the 1920s. In parallel with work on "The Soldier's Tale", Stravinsky was composing "The Wedding", and the folklore intonations of this great ballet are heard not only in the Soldier's violin solos — they permeate the entire score. Meanwhile, the plot, being a collage of Russian fairy tales about a soldier and the devil from the collection of Alexander Afanasiev, served as the basis for a completely international musical collage. Stravinsky ironically sided with American ragtime, then with French waltz, he parodies the Spanish paso doble, then simulates Bach chorale, and references to military brass music of the 19th century connect "The Soldier's Tale" with the opera "The Moor" — the composer's bow towards the "Golden Age" of Russian literature and music.

The author himself explained to Robert Craft: «My original idea was to transpose the period and style of our play to any time and 1918, and to many nationalities and none…. The soldier of the original production was dressed in the uniform of a Swiss army private of 1918, while the costume, and especially the tonsorial apparatus, of the lepidopterist were of the 1830 period. <...>  Our soldier in 1918 was very definitely perceived as a victim of the world conflict at the time, despite the neutrality of the plot. "The Soldier's Tale" remains my only theatre piece with reference to the present day».

Alexei Zuev is a pianist who versatilely combines the traditions of Russian and European performing schools in his work. Alumnus of the Secondary Special Music School at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory, he later trained with Alexei Lubimov and Eliso Virsaladze in Salzburg and Munich, and then became an associate professor at the Mozarteum University Salzburg. His career has developed mainly in Alpine Europe: he gives concerts in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Luxembourg, while his performances in Russia take place as part of the Moscow Easter Festival, the Diaghilev Festival, and other major music forums.

The concert programme represents a brief history of the piano conceived as the "king of instruments" that is able to compete with the orchestra in expressiveness and scale of sound. One of the first and most significant advocates of this concept was Franz Liszt. Beethoven's symphonies in his transcription for piano have become a manifesto of their kind, a hymn to the limitless possibilities of the instrument. Liszt created the transcriptions of most of the symphonies (including the Symphony No. 4) in the early 1860s as he sought to demonstrate the full range of advantages of new pianos with an iron frame. Another, no less significant motivation for the creation of the cycle was the promotion of Beethoven's music. As a matter of fact, for many listeners of Liszt's concert tours, his transcriptions were the only opportunity to hear Beethoven's symphony.

"Beethoven's name is sacred in art," Liszt would later write in the preface to the complete edition of the transcriptions. Liszt himself put a lot of effort into this sacralization; the universal recognition of Beethoven as the supreme god of the musical pantheon is largely to Liszt's credit, who was a world-famous virtuoso and influential intellectual. He finished the arrangement of the symphonies during the years of solitude in a monastery on the outskirts of Rome – an obvious symbolic gesture, an invitation to view the scores of the last Viennese classic as the new Holy Scripture. Liszt carefully transferred into his scores all of Beethoven's orchestral instructions, including even those that cannot be performed on the piano. The transcriptions are so demanding in terms of technique, endurance and musicality that the pianist who dares to perform them is forced to treat them with a kind of religious zeal – otherwise it is hardly possible to cope with difficulties.

Stravinsky's The Firebird was written at a time when composers reached the pinnacle of luxury and elegance in the field of symphonic colour. It is highly unlikely that the arrangement of the ballet was made by the author for public performance – rather, it was intended for rehearsals and close acquaintance with music. As was customary in those years, the score exploits the specific sound capabilities of each instrument. The piano transcription deprives the music of a good part of its colourful orchestral flair, takes the listener out of a romantic trance and offers him a more detached and clear view of things. In the piano version, the structure of the composition is clearer, the rhythms are more legible, and stylistic borrowings from colleagues (from the Mighty Five to Scriabin and Debussy) are more evident.

The Five Fingers, composed in 1921, is an important opus despite its modest size. Its declarative transparency and sound austerity is only one step away from the future neoclassicism. There is nothing left of romantic piano practice here: there is no pedal, there are no virtuoso passages, subtle gradations of dynamics and textured depth in several layers. The piano, perhaps for the first time, is equal to itself here and no longer tries to imitate anyone. The age of rivalry with the orchestra has been left behind.

The programme of the quartet of soloists of La Voce Strumentale ensemble consists of works by Czech composers who died in Nazi concentration camps during the World War II.

Before the war, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Gideon Klein, and Erwin Schulhoff had been building successful musical careers. Haas was considered Janáček's best student and created his style at the intersection of Moravian folklore, Jewish liturgical music, jazz, and neoclassicism. Krása worked as a tutor at the New German Theatre in Prague, studied with Tsemlinsky and communicated in Paris with Roussel and Les Six. His style was distinguished by grotesque, irony, and inventive instrumentation. Klein studied with Alois Hába, wrote works on voice studies in Mozart's quartets at the university and enthusiastically read classical scores even in bed before going to sleep. Erwin Schulhoff, having served in the army in the World War I, returned from Italian captivity as a man of leftist beliefs, corresponded with Berg, wrote funny absurdist plays under the influence of Dadaists and dancing in nightclubs, and gradually moved towards social realism, even managing to compose a cantata on the text of the "Communist Manifesto".

After the German occupation of the Czech Republic they all shared the same destiny. Due to their Jewish origin, they were banned from working, and their compositions were no longer allowed to be performed on stage. Schulhoff's music was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis back in the 1930s. In 1941, he applied for Soviet citizenship and received it – but was arrested before he could leave, and died a year later in prison from tuberculosis. Haas divorced his wife in order to get her and daughter out of harm's way, tried to leave and sought help from friends abroad, but to no avail. Klein received a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but was unable to leave the country due to German anti-Jewish laws. In 1941, Haas, Krása, and Klein were sent to Terezin, a garrison town turned into a Jewish ghetto. Despite the unbearable living conditions (in 4 years 33 thousand people died there from hunger, disease, and torture), Terezin, according to the memoirs of survivors, was one of the most artistically free places in Europe during the years of war. There they wrote music on illegally imported music paper, played concerts on contraband instruments, and even staged operas.

In 1944, a propaganda film was made about Terezin ("Theresienstadt: The Führer Gives a City to the Jews"), in which Haas could be seen bowing after the premiere of his orchestral piece, and the children's choir sang the opera by Krása - the last composition he completed before his arrest. Shortly after the end of filming, the inhabitants of Terezin were sent to Auschwitz, where Dr. Josef Mengele personally supervised the distribution of the arrivals to the gas chambers. Haas was killed on October 16, Krása – on October 18. Klein died under unclear circumstances in January 1945 during the liquidation of the Fürstengrube camp.

Haas' String Quartet No. 3 was completed in 1938: an anxious, restless nervousness is mixed with subjective and emotional lyricism in it. Krása 's String Quartet was written in 1921: this is an acutely personal statement, in which the influence of the late Romantics is combined with an interest in mass commercial music, black humour, and paradoxical assemblage in the spirit of the Weimar Republic. The 1944 Partita for Strings is Klein's last composition: two weeks after completion, at the age of 25, he was sent to Auschwitz. Schulhoff's Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1923 are short and technically sophisticated exercises in parody danceability, a venerable Baroque genre of dance suite reflected in an ironic mirror.

For many years Greek cellist, composer, improviser, researcher Yiorgos Kaloudis has been exploring the possibilities of playing the classical Cretan lyra, one of the most ancient musical instruments. Combining the techniques of cello playing and the features of the traditional Cretan lyra, he upgraded the instrument by adding the fourth string (lower cello C).

In the programme comprising masterpieces of the Middle Ages and Baroque music, this ancient instrument, the ancestor of most European bowed string instruments, will sound in all its timbre beauty and variety of technical capabilities.

The classical Cretan lyra is a pear-shaped, traditionally three-stringed bowed instrument, often with additional sympathetic strings. The strings on it are clamped with nails, and not pressed with fingers to the soundboard. One of the most ancient ways of sound production gives an unusually sparse whistling tone. It was preserved intact due to the fact that this ancestor of many European bowed instruments for centuries "lived" in the local traditional culture, was played at dance parties (bells were often attached to the bow) and did not come into view of professional musicians.

Yiorgos Kaloudis delved deep into the research and practice of playing the classical Cretan lyra in 2005. Combining the techniques of cello playing and the features of the traditional Cretan lyra, he upgraded the instrument by adding the fourth string.

In the LA RÊVEUSE programme, the classical Cretan lyra appears as an ideal solo and accompanying the vocal (performed by Yiorgos Kaloudis himself) instrument for the music of the Middle Ages. At the same time, due to the author's improvements and author's transcriptions, the classical Cretan lyra brilliantly copes with Baroque masterpieces written for viola da gamba.

The programme opens with a hymn dedicated to John the Baptist. The music is attributed to the founder of the entire European musical system Guido D'Arezzo: the initial syllables of the lines of the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis – ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la – still signify the steps of the musical scale. The English song of the 13th century about saying goodbye to summer is placed side by side with a selection of famous vocal compositions by the greatest poet and composer of the Middle Ages, Guillaume de Machaut. These are followed by outstanding examples of French music of the 17th and 18th centuries – a one-part concerto for two violas da gamba (transcribed for one Cretan lyra) by Jean de Sainte-Colombe and pieces by his famous pupil Marin Marais.

Yiorgos Kaloudis is a cellist, classical Cretan lyra performer, improviser, composer. As a classical Cretan lyra player, Yiorgos Kaloudis has released seven albums, and performed solo concerts at the Megaron Hall in Athens, at festivals of early, academic, and jazz music in different European countries and in Russia, collaborated with orchestras including the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra and the Lege Artis Chamber Choir in St. Petersburg, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Thessaloniki. At this time, with the scientific supervision of the University of Crete, he works on the musical research project: “Publication of a teaching method of Classical Cretan Lyra and application of modern technological means in its interpretation”. Among Kaloudis' creative partners are mezzo soprano Irini Tsirakidis, pianist Dimitra Kokkinopoulou, actress of ancient drama Sophia Hill, as well as the ensembles Thesis Trio and musicAeterna4.

The Diaghilev Festival closes with an alternative music concert. There are three teams in the lineup representing different sides of the current club scene: post-punk gothic by the St. Petersburg duo DK Postoronnikh, noir-electro-pop by the Moscow duo Love Object, and psychedelic dream-pop by a Perm band Half Moon Glass.

Verified guitar minimalism and cool urban lyrics: DK Postoronnikh bring genre eclecticism back to post-punk and create melancholic polyphony. Its leitmotif is the search for the crack that splits hopes one by one, leaving only bitter disappointment and fear of the future.

Love Object is a new intriguing electro-pop project of the Moscow duo Dasha Utochka and Danya Mu. Both have previously toured the world as DJs: Utochka as DJ Aktu and Mu as DJ Mucity. The imaginary world created by Love Object is populated by characters that seem to have come out of Cronenberg's films. The band's otherworldly sound is a futuristic neo-noir landscape in which strange dramas unfold, and villains use mind control to question the very meaning of the word "human" in a digital society.

Half Moon Glass are Perm based adepts of summer relaxed sound a la Tame Impala. The psychedelic dream-pop of the band, instead of catchy melodies, brings to the fore guitar flanger, analogue synthesizer sequences, chill groove, dreamy and melancholic sound. The group successfully performed at the St. Petersburg Shau Karau festival, the "Night at the Museum" party at PERMM, and many other events.

Marko Nikodijevic and Luka Kozlovacki are a techno duo of two academic composers from Serbia. Marko Nikodievich was a resident of the Cité internationale des arts in Paris and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, his music is performed by leading ensembles and orchestras in Europe, including musicAeterna. He is interested in nonlinear mathematics, chaos theory, and algorithmic methods of composition. Serbian-Swedish composer and sound designer Luka Kozlovacki studied sonology and algorithmic composition at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague, his music is played both at the Under Bron Stockholm Club and at the Paris Philharmonic. Together, Nikodievich and Kozlovacki perform at the leading Berlin techno festivals, creating ascetic dance canvases interweaving drones and loops.