THE OPENING OF THE 26th SEASON. PRESS RELEASE
"Helikon-Opera" meets it 26th season in the house on Nikitskaya, where the theatre was born in the 90ies. Initially there was only five persons: four soloists and a director. And we have a dream that one day our small theater will be transformed into a magnificent palace like in a fairy tale. And finally our dream come true! We cannot completely believe it. The sublime atrium of the grand entrance, can it really be true?
Underfoot there is a small archaeological museum with artifacts found on the Olympus in Greece, at the Wailing Wall in Israel, in Klin – Tchaikovsky’s homeland, in Mozart house in Salzburg, in Wagner’s Bayreuth and... in Bolshaya Nikitskaya in Princess Shakhovskaya mansion. Overhead there is eternity, the sky panorama, opening through the glass dome.
The grand staircase, cheering each incoming lady with its glaring mirror in which she sees in herself an irresistible beauty... Japanese fountain, which draws with water... parquet, inlaid with rare types of wood... Columns, renovated according to the technology of the 19th century and carefully recreated moldings... Rigorous scientific restoration and stunning modernization...
Staircase to the cloakroom
Historical foyer
Without any fifth dimension the area of the theater has increased nearly five times. The Red Porch of Princess Shakhovskaya mansion became a royal lodge. The walls of the main hall, covered with oak, and giant metal hemispheres under the soffit, nicknamed “helikonchiki” by the builders, create a unique acoustics. Our artistic director has become an unusually talented inventor and a foreman. Renovation and reconstruction of the theater was his most painful, the longest and most colorful production! For centuries!
And today it’s the premiere! Here it is, the moment of happiness for each of the six hundred members of the theatre! During the eight years of exile we didn’t give up, we didn’t run away, didn’t betray each other, as many has predicted. The great point is that we didn’t lost our audience, and finally we are able to pay tribute to them and show what the troupe of "Helikon-Opera" can do! Every director's daft idea can be realized with the most complicated machinery and unique stage equipment. And the first GALA-CONCERT will be the proof of it.
We open the 26th season with extraordinary stage equipment, like 26 mobile platforms, that are incorporated into the main stage. Harry Houdini would have envied of our LED screens, built-in windows of the main hall. We promise that the effect of the illusion at the premiere performances will be used for one hundred percent! We will fearlessly travel through time and space: we’ll visit La Scala and La Fenice, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera, where our artists had success. And now, "Helikon-Opera" can also give assent to any famous troupe, because now we have something to surprise the music world with. But most of all we’d like to surprise our faithful audience...
The premiere gala-concert is not just a collection of dizzying numbers, in the literal sense of the word. This is the story of our theater, which once began with an old "Zaporozhets" in the "Pagliacci" production... In a quarter of a century, the theater gained a breakneck speed: "Zaporozhets" turned into a super-fast ultra-modern car. And it's not a figure of speech, that's what the audience will see on the stage.
Our brilliant friends Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Olga Borodina, Alexander Antonenko, Olga Guryakova, Vasily Ladyuk, Boris Statsenko, Veronika Dzhioeva, Hasmik Grigoryan and Inva Mula, who performed the famous aria of Diva Plavalaguna in the "Fifth Element”, will surely come to congratulate us and share our triumph!
The premiere will be held in the main hall, which is named "Stravinsky". How else could we call it, if the first production of five young Helikon-opera artists was Stravinsky’s "Mavra"?
Our theater has a memory. The names of our beloved are immortalized in the names of halls and saloons: "Pokrovsky", "Obraztsova", "Tikhonov", "Zimin," "Chaliapin", "Tchaikovsky", "Vishnevskaya", "Rostropovich", "Arkhipova," "Ansimov", "Osherovsky"... And the white-columned hall, which bears the name of Princess Shakhovskaya is a tribute to history. Mamontov and Zimin Operas worked here... The walls of this room remember Pushkin, Stanislavsky, Debussy, Alisa Koonen, Sarah Bernhardt...
Pokrovsky Hall
And something more about the memory... Our theater will never forget the help and the support that The Government of Moscow and personally the Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin gave us. We are grateful to the Department of Urban Policy, the Department of Construction and the Department of Culture. Future belongs to those, who have a memory of the past. Believe us, the premiere gala-concert begins the new era of Moscow Opera!
The soloists, choir, orchestra and all the staff of the Moscow music theater "Helikon-Opera" under Dmitry Bertman