October 17, 2023 | Zaryadye Concert Hall
Soloists: Oleg Akkuratov, piano*
Daniil Kramer, piano**
Conductor – Alexey Vereshchagin
Gershwin. Concerto for piano and orchestra*
Gershwin. Porgy and Bess Suite
Tsfasman. Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra**
Shostakovich. Ballet Suites (The Bolt, The Limpid Stream and The Golden Age)
The new program of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia features outstanding works of orchestral jazz and symphonic classics tied with “lighter” musical genres. Under the baton of Alexei Vereshchagin, a former member of the NPR's conductor-training group and now conductor of the Bolshoi (B.A. Pokrovsky Chamber Stage), there will be played opuses by George Gershwin, Alexander Tsfasman and Dmitry Shostakovich.
The program will open with Gershwin's Piano Concerto written after the famous Rhapsody in Blue and confirming the author's stardom. The richness of orchestral palette, the masterly synthesis of improvisation and classical form, the virtuoso romantic brilliance and freshness of jazz idioms – all in all have made the Concerto one of the most popular creations of its kind. Oleg Akkuratov, a unique talent, pianist-improviser, acclaimed by media as a “sensational man”, will play the piano part.
Thе Concerto will be followed by The Suite from the Porgy and Bess opera, also one of the pinnacles in Gershwin's oeuvre, which was premiered on September 30, 1935, in Boston and called forth a real boom in America. The press claimed the work to be “the first authentic and totally American opera”.
In the second part Daniil Kramer, the renowned pianist and most involved promoter of jazz in Russia, will display his excellence as soloist in the sparkling Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra by Alexander Tsfasman. The pianist, composer and bandleader, a contemporary and colleague of Shostakovich, Tsfasman was one of the greats in the history of Russian jazz. His Jazz Suite was written and presented in the year (1945) of the first performance of the Rhapsody in Blue in Moscow (Tsfasman was the first to play it in the USSR). Tsfasman kept the view that with Gershwin's demise the jazz had been over, and always ended concerts of his jazz-band with Gershwin's music.
The NPR will complete the night with Suites from Shostakovich's ballets: The Bolt, The Limpid Stream and The Golden Age, written in the 1930s. The musical language of the works is very close in spirit to the early orchestral jazz and dance music of those times. Two ballets of the three had not been staged for a long time, but owing to Shostakovich's Suites their music has been played and is being played in concert halls.