The Hong Kong Youth Symphony Orchestra, with Lu Xi on violin in a performance conducted by Ng Ka-ming
By Galina StolyarovaOct. 19 2015 19:01If you ask the average person what comes to mind when they think of Yekaterinburg, they'll probably say that it's a highly polluted industrial city and the site where the Romanov family was executed.
But the truth is quite different. This town in the Urals has established itself as a cultural and artistic destination, where music and art curators put on the kind of programs that their colleagues in Moscow and St. Petersburg would envy.
Eurasia Music Festival
The Third International Eurasia Music Festival, which was held in October, was conceived of in 2011 as a way of exploring the musical influences between East and West — a natural niche, considering the city's location on the virtual border between Europe and Asia. Held just three times so far, it has evolved into an arts event that pushes cultural boundaries and brings new meanings and energy to the word "dialogue."
This time, the event showcased arts rarely seen in Russia, such as a performance of the members of the Sufi order Al-Tariqa Al-Gazoulia (Egypt); a solo recital of the French pianist Lucas Debargue, who created a sensation at the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition; or the concert of the European early music ensemble L'Arpeggiata, which creatively blends traditional Mediterranean songs and jazz improvisation. The festival's musical landscape covers two continents and bridges centuries, as it skillfully fuses together works of Beethoven, Bartok, Ligeti, cutting-edge modern Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, and contemporary Russian composer Anton Batagov.
Through diversity, the festival's concerts create a vital sense of unity between the audience and the multi-ethnic performing crowd. In this context, Eurasia becomes more than a geographic region. It is a cultural community where both the performers and the listeners belong in equal measure. Members of the Sufi order, who delivered a hypnotizing performance on Oct. 10 in the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic, were not professional musicians. The ensemble is made up of workers, doctors and writers, and the concert in Yekaterinburg was only their second public performance before a secular audience (the first one took place at the Salzburg Festspiele in July 2014). After the first half of the concert, many members of the audience found themselves nodding their heads along with the performers on stage. This ecstatic amateur performance underscored the spiritual power of music.
The festival offered up a wealth of new works. It opened on Oct. 6 with the world premiere of Anton Batagov's "I See Your Dream, You See My Dream," which was commissioned by the festival. Works of Toshio Hosokawa had their Russian premieres during the event. "What we see at this festival is way beyond the dialogue of styles or epochs. Rather, it is a dialogue between different worlds," said Yekaterina Biryukova, classical music editor with the Colta.ru cultural magazine.
read more: http://news360.com/article/317775210
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