About the festival

12th International Festival of Chamber Performing "Silver Lyre" consists of eight concerts, in which talented musicians from eight countries(Armenia, Belgium, Spain, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Russia) will demonstrate their mastery of chamber music.
The Festival’s peculiar feature is the fact that foreign musicians from Spain, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, who were unable to arrive last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, kept their promise and are coming to St. Petersburg this year.
The Festival will open in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic. The Youth Chamber Orchestra of the Honored Ensemble of Russia of the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Philharmonic under Yaroslav Zaboyarkin will perform chamber compositions by the Japanese composer Yasushi Akutagawa and Estonian composer Jaan Rääts, as well as Haydn's Cello Concerto in C Major and the Concerto for cello and orchestra by Georgian composer Vazha Azarashvili. The international ensemble of this evening will be complemented by a young Armenian cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, the gold medalist of the XIV Competition named after P.I. Tchaikovsky.
A series of six concerts in the Small Hall named after M.I. Glinka will be opened by the Guarneri Trio Prague from the Czech Republic with works by Haydn, Shostakovich and Schubert, already familiar to Petersburg music lovers. The Trio is also celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.
The next concert will be performed by the Lithuanian Piano Duo, consisting of Vilija Poškute and Tomas Daukantas. They will perform transcriptions and original compositions by Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Liszt.
The concert of the Swiss New Baroque Trio is dedicated to the crossover genre. The Trioconsists of Caroline Lambele (violin), Thomas Dobler (vibraphone) and Miguel Angel Cordero (double bass). The program also includes virtuoso transcriptions of works by Bach, Handel, Purcell, Vivaldi and Rameau.
The Festival will continue with a performance by a duet from Moscow — violinist Elena Revich and pianist Polina Osetinskaya, who named their program "Flowers and Fairy Tales". The poetry of the name is fully justified by the content of the concert: the works of Taneyev, Rachmaninov, Arensky, Medtner and Stravinsky. The concert was supposed to take place in March 2020, but it was canceled due to pandemic situation.
The next two evenings are devoted to St. Petersburg musicians. During the first evening pianist Mikhail Benediktov will present his interpretations of Bach's Chaconne, a set from the intermezzo by Brahms and Kreisleriana by Schumann, and during the second evening mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova in an ensemble with pianist Anastasia Rogaleva will present a set of works by French and Russian composers.
The Festival in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic will end with an unusual evening for organ and hammerklavier. Olga Paschenko, a young artist from the Netherlands, will perform both as an organist with works by Bem, Buxtehude and Bach, and as a pianist who has mastered the art of playing the rarest, miraculously preserved instrument, which is one of the types of grand pianos called "hammerklavier" or "hammer piano". Beethoven wrote his 29th Sonata for this instrument, and on this instrument his 4th and 14th Sonatas will be performed.