Opening the 2025 Diaghilev Festival on June 13, Hændel is a theatrical and musical dedication to the great composer on the 340th anniversary of his birth. Performed by the festival’s headliners — the musicAeterna orchestra and choir under the direction of Teodor Currentzis — the concert presents a pasticcio: a collage of arias, ensembles, orchestral and choral scenes from Handel’s operas and oratorios.

A pasticcio (Italian for “pie” or “mash-up”) was a popular 18th-century stage practice — an artfully crafted mix of musical pieces, often from different works, assembled into a new dramatic whole. In Hændel, this form brings together excerpts from Handel’s powerful Old Testament oratorios, dramatic arias from his Italian operas (Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Orlando, Teseo), and dazzling instrumental pieces.

All music will be performed on period instruments and in historical baroque tuning by musicAeterna artists, known for their thoughtful and detailed work with historically informed performance and their pursuit of authentic sound. The semi-staged format and collage-like nature of the production follow the spirit of baroque spectacle — full of illusion, shifting perspectives, scale play, and a deep focus on the voice and space.

Opening the 2025 Diaghilev Festival on June 13, Hændel is a theatrical and musical dedication to the great composer on the 340th anniversary of his birth. Performed by the festival’s headliners — the musicAeterna orchestra and choir under the direction of Teodor Currentzis — the concert presents a pasticcio: a collage of arias, ensembles, orchestral and choral scenes from Handel’s operas and oratorios.

A pasticcio (Italian for “pie” or “mash-up”) was a popular 18th-century stage practice — an artfully crafted mix of musical pieces, often from different works, assembled into a new dramatic whole. In Hændel, this form brings together excerpts from Handel’s powerful Old Testament oratorios, dramatic arias from his Italian operas (Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Orlando, Teseo), and dazzling instrumental pieces.

All music will be performed on period instruments and in historical baroque tuning by musicAeterna artists, known for their thoughtful and detailed work with historically informed performance and their pursuit of authentic sound. The semi-staged format and collage-like nature of the production follow the spirit of baroque spectacle — full of illusion, shifting perspectives, scale play, and a deep focus on the voice and space.

Samson and Delilah (1877) is a masterpiece of French musical theatre and a pinnacle of Camille Saint-Saëns’s (1835–1921) career. The opera tells the biblical story of the legendary hero Samson and the cunning seductress Delilah, who deceitfully uncovers the secret of his supernatural strength. Merging the grandeur of the Old Testament with the sensual intensity of the music, Saint-Saëns emerges in Samson and Delilah as the heir to the tradition of 18th-century French lyric tragedy. It is no coincidence that librettist Ferdinand Lemaire decided to base on a text by Voltaire, originally written in 1734 for Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Samson. A gem of the global opera repertoire, Samson and Delilah is a rare guest on Russian stages: the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre and the Diaghilev Festival present the first Russian production of this Saint-Saëns opera in recent years.

Varvara Myagkova returns to the Diaghilev Festival with a new solo program — a romantic collage that moves from Schumann’s Kreisleriana and Brahms’s Theme and Variations to the “Russian fairy tales” of Medtner. The program closes with a surprising contrast: Prokofiev’s sharp and witty miniatures in Sarcasms paired with elegant Baroque sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti.

The pianist’s goal is to uncover and highlight the visible and hidden connections between works from different styles and eras: “By bringing together pieces that seem so different and unrelated, I’ve not only shared my entire artistic experience, but also couldn’t ignore the voice that runs through them — a voice that is passionate, engaged, and full of selfless devotion. I want to rediscover these works as if they were freshly written today. We are not just inheritors of these notes. They live within us from the moment they were created to this very moment.”

Varvara Myagkova rose to fame thanks to the spread of her recordings and interviews on social media. Since 2019, the solo career of this Moscow Conservatory graduate — who spent many years working with a children’s choir — has taken off rapidly. Today, she performs in top concert halls and at major music festivals across Russia. Her repertoire is vast, ranging from Bach to contemporary composers writing in the style of “new simplicity,” some of whom have written pieces especially for her.