Moscow music theatre Helikon Opera’s soloists will sing on our theatre’s stage for the first time. On February 21, Irina Samoylova and Igor Morozov play main roles in “Sadko” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The performance is a part of the festival “Stars Parade in the Opera”.

Irina Samoylova is a laureate of many Russian and international awards. The Bolshoi’s spectators applauded to her irreproachable singing of the most complex arias in the Russian operas - Antonida in “A Life for the Tsar” by Glinka, Snow Maiden and Tsaritsa of Shemakha in “The Golden Cockerel” by Rimsky-Korsakov. She performed in opera theatres in Italy, Austria, France, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Spain, Monaco, the Netherlands.

Igor Morozov - the laureate of the international awards - possesses the beautiful light tenor voice. The singer’s repertoire includes more than 20 roles in such operas as “Boris Godunov” by Mussorgsky, “Eugene Onegin” by Tchaikovsky, “The Magic Flute” by Mozart, and others. The artist sang on stages of the Estonian National Opera, the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, Belgian La Monnaie, The Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Opéra de Nice, the Municipal Theatre of Santiago, he gave concerts in Germany and France.

Helicon Opera’s maestro Andrei Shlyachkov is at the conductor’s stand - the gifted musician, the author of more than hundred orchestrations for the Nekrasov Academic Orchestra of Russian Folk Instruments which he conducts now. Music critics say the young conductor is a man of pure artistic taste and creative intuition.

The opera is based upon the medieval epic about Sadko - a proud-spirited gusli musician. Destiny led him through the farness and domain of the Sea Tsar. Sadko’s adventures is a terrific basis for an artist to use his imagination - no wonder that the famous Soviet artist Fyodor Fedorovsky was awarded the Stalin Prize for his decorations for the “Sadko” performance in the Bolshoi Theatre.

Views of Veliky Novgorod, market squares, landowners’ lavish mansions as well as the underwater tsardom of the Sea Tsar - all these decorations were reconstructed with care bits by bits by Dmitri Cherbadzhi, the member of the Russian Academy of Arts. Special mention should be made of the costumes: Sadko, Volkhova, Lyubava, Nezhata, men at arms, merchants from Novgorod and abroad, shipbuilders, wandering minstrels, beautiful maidens, white swans, sea monsters and knuckers - the list of all the opera’s characters is really long. More than 300 costumes embroidered in pearls and other precious gems were sewn for all of them. The choir alone shifts costumes three times during the show: at the beginning the choir singers play parts of white swans, later they are the underwater tsardom maidens, at the end of the opera they perform while wearing Russian folk costumes.

Next to the drawn decorations there is 3D Projection Mapping onto the stage - it lets spectators see a storming sea, real swans moving along a lake. And the centrepiece of the performance is a Sadko’s ancient sailboat which sails the seas right on the stage in a very realistic manner.