About the festival

A year ago, the «Silver Lyre» festival celebrated its ten’s anniversary. Just when the festival’s directorate took a breath, looked at everything that had been done in the past years and began to prepare for the next festival, an unprecedented enemy - the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic – attack ruined all the plans. The negotiations with foreign musicians went downhill, the entire building of the future chamber forum collapsed, and the question arose: whether the festival could take place at all.
And nevertheless, by the beginning of October all organizational issues were resolved. Unlike previous festivals with participation of musicians from seven, eight or even nine countries, the current one meant to be purely Russian. However, all eight concerts will be video recorded and broadcasted both on the website of the Philharmonic Society and on Society's YouTube channel.
As usual, the opening and closing ceremonies of the festival will take place in the Grand Philharmonic Hall, and six other concerts will be held in the Small Hall named after M.I. Glinka.
The festival will open with a performance by the Youth Chamber Orchestra, created on the basis of the Yuri Temirkanov Symphony Orchestra. Director and conductor of the new orchestra Yaroslav Zaboyarkin and pianist Polina Osetinskaya will perform their interpretation of the works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Mendelssohn.
The series of concerts in the Small Hall will be opened by the piano duo "PetRoDuet" with Anastasia Rogaleva and Dmitry Petrov. The program of their concert will also feature two Rachmaninov's suites for two pianos.
The «crossover» genre is dedicated to the concert of the jazz quartet under the direction of the famous vibraphone player Alexey Chizhik, who together with pianist Oleg Belov, percussionist Peter Mikheev and bass guitarist Viktor Savich, will present their interpretation of the eternal creations of Vivaldi, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Bizet along with their own compositions.
The next evening will be devoted to the Bessonov brothers - pianist Ivan and violinists Nikita and Daniil. In the recent past they were residents of Saint-Petersburg and now they study at the Central Music School at the Moscow Conservatory. This concert is the development of a new festival tradition of presenting talented young musicians to the public. The tradition was eastablished after Alexandra Dovgan’s piano performance at the «Silver Lear» festival last year. The festival will continue with a concert of the Piano Trio of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society. The pianist Dmitry Pavliy, the violinist Igor Zolotarev and the cellist Nikita Zubarev will perform two large trios of Tchaikovsky and Rakhmaninov.
The next two evenings will be dedicated to solo performances. In the first concert, cellist Alexey Zhilin and pianist Inga Dzektser will perform an extensive program of cello masterpieces, and in the next concert the young Petersburg pianist Elizaveta Ukrainskaya will present all four Scherzos by Chopin along with Mozart's sonata and Debussy's pieces.
The festival will close with a large gala concert dedicated to the instrumental and vocal creations of Antonio Vivaldi. The Divertissement chamber orchestra and its director, the violinist Ilya Ioff, as well as the Moscow singer Yana Ivanilova, will perform both the composer's famous instrumental concerts and selected arias from his oratorios and operas.