20–31 December 2021
Founders of the festival: Valery Gergiev and Mira Yevtich

At the end of December the Mariinsky Theatre will be hosting its traditional major piano festival. Over the course of twelve days, audiences will have the opportunity to hear both acclaimed maestri, whose names need no recommendation, and talented young pianists, of whom people have only just begun to speak. The programme of the XVI Mariinsky Piano Festival promises much of interest. There will be solo recitals by Nikolai Lugansky and Boris Berezovsky. Seong-Jin Cho and Alexandre Kantorow will be appearing both in recital and with orchestra. Denis Matsuev, Dmitry Shishkin and Sergei Redkin are to be accompanied by the orchestra. All of these pianists have been prize-winners at the Tchaikovsky Competition over the years, though their victories at this prestigious competition have served merely as a trampoline in their careers, the task of such competitions being to draw attention to new names in music. One of the most respected and revered such forums is the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. At the closing concert of the festival we are to hear the recent winners of this highly demanding competition – Bruce Liu and Alexander Gadjiev, as well as seventeen-year-old Muscovite finalist Eva Gevorgyan. The public has followed Eva Gevorgyan with interest since 2019, when as a pupil of Natalia Trull she performed at the Mariinsky Theatre for the first time. It will be possible to become more familiar with these highly-promising young pianists at concerts given by respected St Petersburg teachers from the Secondary Special Music School of the St Petersburg Conservatory Zora Zucker, Anna Rychkova, Zoya Sapiton and Vladimir Suslov as well as the class of Grigory Gruzman who taught in Weimar. These concerts are to be held at the new Rachmaninoff Hall for chamber music (in the South Wing of the Concert Hall), which is an ideal venue for piano music evenings.

At each and every festival the organisers Mira Yevtich and Valery Gergiev strive to invite musicians who have never before performed in St Petersburg.
The piano music concerts are always eagerly attended by the public, including for the variety of the repertoire performed. The twenty-two concerts will provide a de facto anthology of piano music: from Bach’s preludes and fugues, sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, works by Romantics and Impressionists to concerti by Shchedrin. The soloists will be accompanied by the Mariinsky Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev.

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