The 15th International Festival Stars Parade at the Opera. Slovtsov will come to a close on March 29 with a concert by People’s Artist of the RSFSR Sergei Leiferkus. The world-renowned baritone singer will travel to Krasnoyarsk to celebrate his 80th birthday and perform at the Hvorostovsky Krasnoyarsk State Opera and Ballet Theatre. A longtime friend of the Theatre, he has appeared on its stage many times in both productions and concerts.

The programme brings together two works that might seem, at first glance, worlds apart: excerpts from Tosca by Giacomo Puccini in the first half of the concert, and Anti-Formalist Rayok by Dmitri Shostakovich in the second one. In fact, each work, in its own way, explores the timeless conflict between the artist and authority.

Although Puccini’s opera is named after its heroine, the singer Floria Tosca, it is the Chief of Police, Baron Scarpia who holds the drama together. The opera opens with his musical motif, and it is his name on her lips as Tosca throws herself from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo. Scarpia is a figure of many facets: is he a calculating sadist or a philosopher of evil? A collector of suffering or a cold sensualist? A refined monster or a hypocritical guardian of the law? Together with Sergei Leiferkus, audiences will be invited to explore these questions.

Shostakovich wrote his satirical Anti-Formalist Rayok as a direct participant in the conflict it portrays. During the 1948 campaign against so-called “formalism” in Soviet music, Shostakovich himself fell under attack, along with other major composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, and Nikolai Myaskovsky. Party officials accused them of chasing misguided innovation and losing touch with the tastes of the Soviet people. In this work, Shostakovich sharply parodies the speeches of functionaries and apparatchiks, exposing not only the absurdity of their accusations but also their ignorance—one character, Troikin, for instance, pontificates about Rimsky-Korsakov.

Sergei Leiferkus will appear as the Narrator and perform the roles of Yedinitsyn, Dvoikin, and Troikin.