Singing Crossroads

The Singing Crossroads Chamber Music Festival created by the Novaya Opera Theatre’s Director Dmitry Sibirtsev, a pianist and winner of the Moscow State Prize and the Irina Arkhipova Foundation Prize, almost immediately gained the affection of the public and critics alike. This year the festival is dedicated to one of the main music forms of the 19th and 20th centuries – the vocal cycle. A wide-ranging programme comprises vocal cycles by Robert Schumann, Antonin Dvorăk, Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Maurice Ravel, Jacques Ibert, Modest Mussorgsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Valery Gavrilin, to name a few.

The dialogue with the Epiphany Festival (the theme of this year is Dialogues and Doubles) has brought about a peculiar cross-talk between pieces: two images of love in Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und-leben vocal cycles, Ravel's Don Quichotte a Dulcinee and Ibert’s Chansons de Don Quichotte, Mussorgsky’s Rayok and Shostakovich’s Anti-Formalist Rayok.

The Singing Crossroads Festival is yet another plane of the spiritual dialogue between the Novaya Opera Theatre and its founder, Evgeny Vladimirovich Kolobov. In the late 1990s, the great conductor established a tradition of chamber music concerts in the Mirror Foyer. In 2013, these concerts were revived on the initiative of Dmitry Sibirtsev.