Pyotr Glavatskikh: «The Arrival of the Ship»

The Arrival of the Ship is a project by Pyotr Glavatskikh — a regular participant of the Diaghilev Festival, Moscow-based multipercussionist, composer, and producer. It is a musical homage to the Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran and his book The Prophet, written as a collection of philosophical prose poems. At the heart of the parable lies the idea of the fundamental unity of religions. Pyotr Glavatskikh’s project is also based on unification — not of faiths, but of cultural traditions and musical worlds.

Bollywood actress Shriya Saran dances in the traditional Indian Kathak style and reads excerpts from Khalil Gibran’s book in English. Ildar Khabibullin, soloist of the Hindustani Ensemble and a master of traditional Indian vocal music, performs and reads the Russian translation.

In dialogue with the classical North Indian Hindustani tradition are works by the legendary philosopher and musician Hazrat Inayat Khan. In 1913, he lived in Moscow for seven months, performing Indian classical music and spreading his original philosophical ideas. Russian musicians helped him publish the collection Songs of Hindustani, which included Indian melodies arranged for piano. Some of them, in arrangements for string quintet, became part of the mystery ballet Shakuntala, staged by Alexander Tairov in 1914. Alongside fragments from this ballet, the program includes Grigory Smirnov’s Mirrors of Emptiness and a new percussion piece by Pyotr Glavatskikh inspired by Gibran’s writings.