Russia (bbabo.net), - After moving to the St. Petersburg House of Radio, the Greek maestro Theodore Currentzis and his MusicAeterna collectives did not even think of breaking with their former habitat. At the three-day December festival "Diaghilev +", a series of programs was presented, which developed into an educational workshop with orchestral, choral and recitals, a vocal and orchestral master class and a collective premiere on poems by Charles Baudelaire.

In the festival booklet Currentzis declared that the Diaghilev Festival is not only music: "These are questions, ideas. This is an occasion to look at the familiar through the eyes of a stranger. A chance to forget the familiar and open yourself." The right he recognizes for his listeners, as well as for himself, to a personal interpretation of events deliberately modifies the standard festival formats, brings them into a huge discussion space. "Diaghilev +" is perceived, rather, as a kind of a traveling humanitarian academy, where the artistic director himself acts not only as a curator, strategist, performer, but also as a character. Nothing like this happens at other festivals, but at Diaghilev it is the norm.

A three-hour master class at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theater, where the maestro worked with four pairs of "soloist-conductor" and the MusicAeterna orchestra, in terms of the content of professional comments and the abundance of purely human nuances, was quite comparable with the effects of the opening concert. The suites from Stravinsky's ballets "Petrushka" and "The Firebird" brought down the Hollywood-illuminated sound not of the early, but of the later American author's editions, 1947 and 1945, respectively. The volume of two symphonic blockbusters revealed completely reformatted meanings of the "Russianness" that the outstanding entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev had exhibited in Paris three decades earlier, being carried away by the specifics of both ballet plots more than TNT and the temperamental inexhaustibility of Stravinsky's music itself.

We can say that Currentzis played this story with Diaghilev. The mechanisms of the MusicAeterna orchestra broadcast the scale of Maslenitsa festivities in "Petrushka" with an outlandish illusion. Events then panned, then lay in layers, looking through one another. In the emphasized standard of the solo parts, a kind of unearthly gloss shimmered. The life-giving energy of "Parsley", as well as the luxurious melos of "The Firebird", I wanted to assign a sign of the highest quality. This is the undoubted repertoire success of the collective.

Perm choir Parma Voices touched upon the old theme at the festival. The program in the Organ Hall turned into a "garland" the Christmas motets of the 16th century authors - Cristobal de Morales, Thomas Luis de Victoria and Palestrina with the "pastoral" oratorio In nativatatem Domini canticum of their younger contemporary Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Accompanied by a baroque group of instruments, the oratorio produced a much more festive impression than the monotonous motets in their asceticism. Much more successful, although not at all Christmas, was the night program of the pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, who performed three rarities at the Diaghilev gymnasium: The Life of Machines (1933) by Vladislav Shpilman (prototype of the hero of Roman Polanski's film The Pianist), Sonata No. 4 by Moisei Weinberg ( 1956) and Sonata No. 8 by Sergei Prokofiev (1944). The result is a pianistically flawless statement about the very dissimilar, very personal vocabulary of the authors who had been in rather terrible historical circumstances. An hour and a half of performances did not metaphorically prove at all from what scratches and injuries inflicted by the twentieth century with its regimes, the piano keyboard still "bleeds".

The final action of the festival was the project "Dedication to Baudelaire". The stage director Sergei Larionov unevenly combined six world premieres of contemporary composers with poems (Elena Morozova), plastics (Anna Garafeeva), group mimans (sixteen extras) and fragmentary appearances of the conductor in a long frock coat and glasses (Currentzis as Baudelaire). The format of the performance was the responsibility of the video broadcast of the action on the big screen, objects (poor Yorick's skull) and animals (a tiny snake and a white kid) in the hands of the reader. The most shocking episode in the crowded performance was the episode with live dogs, which barked on command.The thematic cycle of "dedications to poets" was nominally opened with last year's "Dedication to Paul Celan". Although the ancestor of the synthesis-performance revered by Currentzis can be considered a number of premieres that he carried out during his Permian existence - the Cantos mystery play based on the poems of Ezra Pound (music by Alexei Syumak) and the choral performance Tristia on the verses of repressed poets of the 20th century (music by Philippe Hersan, France). In comparison, the excessive visual-semantic row of "Dedication to Baudelaire" distracted from the musical component itself - with the beautiful instrumental-choral beginning of Alexei Retinsky, the radical episode of Vangelino Currentzis with a rock singer and an electric guitar groove, Vladimir Rannev's monologue in the Bergman genre and Shepota's cries "and the luxurious twilight finale by Theodor Currentzis, who effectively disposed of choral fading and instrumental avant-garde against the background of electronic hum.

The quite understandable temptation to aestheticize the "vicious consciousness" of the French poet, who at one time was the first to find himself at the junction of romanticism with symbolism, was thwarted in Perm by the old-fashioned pathos, the lack of distance, and the lack of quotation from Baudelaire's poetic images. On the other hand, "Dedication to Baudelaire" has become a useful experience in recognizing contemporary composers gathered around the currentzis author's names. Once upon a time he offered these names one or two per season. Now he has a whole galaxy of composers in stock. And even he is a composer himself ("a chance to forget the familiar and discover oneself").

The current festival "Diaghilev +" entered the Christmas calendar not so much with the effect of the holiday as with thoughts about the complex structure of art in general, and musical art in particular. Now that the festival has separated from the Perm Opera and Ballet Theater, the Litera A Workshop at the Shpagin Plant has become its residence. The space is problematic from the acoustically point of view, but successful for Currentzis's strategy, always adhering to the "hesitant course" - between constantly updated classics, an avant-garde platform, and listeners going "outside the comfort zone." And the audience now gathering in the workshop spaces of the festival is not decreasing, but only increasing. For Perm people, this is, as one regular spectator wrote on her Facebook, "an opportunity to spend three uniquely filled days in unity with talented and happy people."

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