To Russia, with Song!
Dr Maria Razumovskaya’s blog, following the story of Guildhall School’s involvement in the UK-Russia Year of Music.
Rumour has it that when Guildhall School announced that it would be sending a group of students to sing Russian to the Russians, the list of fearless volunteers was rather long!
Back in 2019 Guildhall School of Music & Drama began stirring up plans for an ambitious collaborative project with the State St Petersburg Museum for Theatre and Music. The aim: to lift the two countries out of the fog of recent political fallouts by reinvigorating awareness of the longstanding fascination that the UK and Russia have shared for each other’s culture. The tools for this mammoth undertaking: the coming together of words and music through that humblest of means — song. Working in bilateral partnership with the Mariinsky Opera and the State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory of Music, the week-long collaborative festival envisaged the coming together of Russian and British musicians to perform Russian music inspired by British text, and British music set to Russian words. Preparations for the project began with such zeal that it garnered the support from the British Council and the British Embassy in Moscow to become one of the handful of official events in the programme of UK-Russia Year of Music.
In the autumn of 2019 that fearless list of volunteers at Guildhall School of Music & Drama was whittled down to five Masters students: vocalists Alexandria Wregglesworth, Jonathan de Garis, and Liam Bonthrone; and pianists Emelia Noack-Wilkinson and Ugne Vazgileviciute. Engaging in an intense schedule of Russian-language and song coaching with Maria Razumovskaya they tackled some of the most iconic treasures of this repertoire such as Benjamin Britten’s Poet’s Echo set to Alexander Pushkin, and the Romances of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky and Miliy Balakirev set to Lord Byron and Percival Shelley. Alongside these they prepared some rare, neglected gems of the repertoire that in all likelihood would be as unknown to audiences of the ‘Venice of the North’ as they had been to them — the Shakespeare Sonnets of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, the Romances of Sergei Taneyev and Cesar Cui.
And so, in time for the new decade’s first Valentine’s Day, the project moves from London to St Petersburg — the spiritual heartland of the Russian romance — and joins the culmination of the city’s celebration of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 175th Anniversary. Having had a ‘dry-run’ of the programme — and received many seals of approval from Russian-speaking well-wishers — at London’s Steinway Hall, the students are all set to board their flight that will take them on their first footing on Russian soil, and their first experience of its language and its culture.
Here they will take part in a day of masterclasses with Russia’s celebrated Mariinsky Soloists Olga Trifonova and Andrei Slavniy in the very apartment of Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg. Then, putting their newly-gained inspiration into action they move to the stunning historical Theatre Museum in the heart of the city to perform this song with the help of Piotr Tchaikovsky’s piano!
As their arrival to Russia with song draws nearer, the sense of excitement and anticipation is immense. Follow their Russian adventures on this blog!
Other events in the project include chamber music performances; an international conference curated by Maria Razumovskaya (UK) and Lidia Ader (Russia) with keynotes by the world-renowned specialist in Russian song and literature: Professor Philip Bullock from the University of Oxford, and Professor Olga Manulkina from the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory and Faculty of the Liberal Arts of the St Petersburg University; and a performance of Russian song — Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov and Medtner — in the Sheremetev Palace with Mariinsky Soloists Ekaterina Shimanovich and Natalia Evstafyeva accompanied by Iain Burnside and Maria Razumovskaya.
The project is kindly supported by a grant from the British Council and British Embassy in Moscow; and the Cross-Language Dynamics project through AHRC’s Open World Research Initiative. The visit of Guildhall School students to St Petersburg for this project is indebted to the generosity of Professor Sir Barry Ife CBE and Dr Trudi Darby.
Find out more about Guildhall School events in the UK-Russia Year of Music.
Read the second blog post in this series: ‘To hit, or not to hit…’
