On 16 May 2023, the Music Festival ‘Tsars and Muses: Opera at the Russian Court’ has finished in the Patriarch’s Palace after four years run in the Moscow Kremlin Museums. This series of concerts were dedicated to the birth and formation of the Russian opera.
The final evening introduced to the public the first opera of Igor Stravinsky “Nightingale”. Inspired by the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, he wrote the libretto to the opera together with his friend Stepan Mitusov. The soloists and orchestra of the Moscow State Opera and Ballet Theatre for Young Audience named after Natalia Sats and headed by Sergei Mikheev performed the parts.
“The opera ‘Nightingale’ remains attractive for many stage directors during the whole 20th century until now, it is a part of the repertoire of European and Russian theatres. In Russia, 77 years after the first premier in 1918 in Petrograd, the Mariinsky Theatre staged the opera again and it is still going on. Later, in 2014 the Stravinsky’s ‘Nightingale’ was staged in the Helikon-Opera, the play is still in theatre’s repertoire. We wanted to show what is not on stage yet, something out of regular repertoire. The Moscow State Opera and Ballet Theatre for Young Audience named after Natalia Sats turned to this opera in 2015 and today, in Patriarch’s Palace, we will listen to the special version, adapted for our festival,” noted Elena Milovzorova, Head of the Publishing and Special Programs Department of the Moscow Kremlin Museums.