The musicAeterna Orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis will perform two compositions considered the pinnacle of the symphonic tragedy genre at the opening of the Diaghilev Festival 2022.

Richard Strauss was composing the symphonic etude "Metamorphosen" in the last months of World War II and finished it in April 1945. The experience of living through a catastrophe gave impetus for the birth of one of the most exquisite symphonic adagios. "Perhaps, Strauss lived until 85 years solely to create this magnificent thing," the French critic Roland-Manuel would later write. Using centuries-old rhetorical means of expressing grief, weaving motifs in a masterful, continuously changing counterpoint, Strauss composed an elegy for the death of the former world.

Tchaikovsky in his Symphony No. 6 paves the way to the future, to the acute expression of musical psychodramas of the 20th century. Here the music's emotional charge reaches an unprecedented level. The extreme imaginative and dynamic contrasts that bewildered the first listeners still retain a shocking power of impact and inevitably throw the audience off balan.

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

The vocal cycle "Russia Cast Adrift" is one of Sviridov's most significant music works composed to the poems by Sergei Yesenin. The selection of texts for the cycle revealed to the listeners unfamiliar Yesenin — a mystic, a religious thinker. Upon Yesenin's lines, Sviridov wrote his own poem about Russia with a deep philosophical basis, a poetic-archaic sound and a cut-through movement from landscape lyrics through dramatic collisions to the anthemic finale.

Sviridov conceived the cycle "Russia Cast Adrift" as a symphonic opus and insisted on the genre definition of "poem", but he never got the chance to do the orchestration. This task was completed by one of the leading composers of the 40-year-old generation Alexey Sioumak, who rearranged Sviridov's cycle for the chamber ensemble.

The programme by the musicAeterna orchestra soloists combines two famous chamber ensemble compositions, one of which opens, and the other closes the era of Romanticism in music. Schubert's string quartet "Death and the Maiden" lets poetry into the formerly strict classicist genre of pure music, whereas Schönberg with his string sextet "Enlightened Night" sums up the late Romantic style and introduces "neologisms" into it which later would lead to the birth of the new, atonal music. Both masterpieces have hidden literary programmes that clarify while at the same time obscure their complex content.

Songs are like flowers gathered in distant meadows and woven into an intricate fragrant wreath. In different languages, musicians offer hymns to blossoming, their native land, and love. The concert programme will feature folk songs in Russian, Armenian, Slovak, Hungarian, Albanian and Tatar languages, original compositions and arrangements of traditional melodies.

Pauses, attention to silence, contemplation become tools for exploring the passage of time and the flow of human life in the concert by Parma Voices choir. The Perm Opera choir conducted by Evgeny Vorobyov will present a selection of rarely performed, mostly spiritual compositions of the 20th century.

Georg Philipp Telemann was a famous, even fashionable composer, cantor and director of the Opera of the free city of Hamburg. Johann Sebastian Bach was a highly respected among professionals master in the church service in Leipzig. Contemporaries who followed each other's work, they were not rivals, but friends. In their music one can find general style semblance as well as a lot of individual differences — both are to be demonstrated in the concert by the Rosarium Chamber Orchestra.

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

Composer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Petr Glavatskikh dedicates the programme to Iannis Xenakis, whose 100th birthday anniversary is celebrated this year. The Greek classic of the 20th century brought the music for percussion solo to a new philosophical, virtuoso, and concert level. Two parts of his famous opus Rebonds A and B characterized by incredible technical complexity and powerful rhythmic pressure will open and close the programme. 

Modern compositions will be performed between them – from the Russian premiere of Lera Auerbach's opus to Petr Glavatskikh's own work written for semantron.

The title of the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Moscow Conservatory Centre for Electroacoustic Music programme copies the name of Dmitri Kourliandski's series Unsolvable Acoustic Cases, one piece of which will be performed in concert. Meanwhile, both this and other 'audio landscapes of the late Anthropocene epoch and the transition to the Digital Hegemony Age' created by the classics of our days Alexander Schubert, Pierre Zholdovsky, and Iannis Xenakis do not talk about unsolvableness, but are looking for and eventually finding a gateway for new music into new worlds. The interspersion of live performance, soundtracks, and video sequence opens up incredible opportunities for listeners: a high level of perception and understanding of contemporary music and, more broadly, contemporary art is almost guaranteed. And the transition period from the Anthropocene to Digital Hegemony during this concert does not seem so ill-fated for culture in particular and humanity in general.