Abridged English translation. Read the complete article in Russian.
Beethoven Hall offers an extraordinarily rich concert life. The Bolshoi’s singers and instrumentalists regularly demonstrate their artistry on this intimate home stage, in events that too rarely receive the attention they deserve. For ordinary listeners, this also means the chance to buy a ticket and hear world-class music at close quarters.
Even against that distinguished background, the Bolshoi Wind Quintet’s concert on 30 November 2016 stood out. Its modest title, Music from the Bolshoi Theatre’s Favourite Productions, concealed an exceptional programme: familiar operatic and ballet music transformed into vivid instrumental theatre.
The combination of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn offered far more than a miniature orchestra. Each instrument retained its personality while contributing to a shared dramatic world. The musicians’ virtuosity served character, colour and expression rather than display alone, with Nikolai Popov’s flute especially memorable.
The second half opened with excerpts from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Jonathan Russell’s arrangement, presented here for the first time in Russia. Reducing so complex a score to five instruments might have seemed impossible. Yet the quintet conveyed its rhythmic extremes and elemental ritual energy with remarkable force and colour, as though a spring whirlwind had swept through Beethoven Hall.
The programme concluded with Jean Françaix’s Hommage à l’ami Papageno, a fantasy on Mozart’s The Magic Flute for piano and ten winds. The quintet was joined by pianist Natalia Kiseleva, flautist Stanislav Yaroshevsky, cor anglais player Vladislav Komissarchuk, clarinettist Mikhail Mering, contrabassoonist Alexei Marutayev and horn player Ilya Pervozvansky.
The evening demonstrated how the spirit of the Bolshoi’s music and the character of Beethoven Hall can meet in chamber performance: intimate in scale, yet expansive in imagination.
