At the Hvorostovsky Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, a series of early music concerts launched by conductor Ivan Velikanov will continue with a concert Baroque. Opera. Love on March 3.

Unlike Old Europe Christmas, the first concert of the music cycle, the orchestra's full complement will appear on the stage. The soloist of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre Natalia Kirillova (soprano) and a lute player Marina Belova are again invited. The Krasnoyarsk Opera soloists are also involved in the event: Alexandra Cherpakova, Daria Ryabinko, Olga Monastyrshina, Alexander Mikhaliov, Valentin Kolesnikov, Alexei Sokolov are going to sing baroque music works of the 17th and 18th centuries.

This time the protagonist is Orpheus from ancient Greek mythology - the legendary singer, musician, lyre player, whose name personified the power of art. And the love story of Orpheus and his wife Eurydice, whom he was not frightened to follow down to the underworld after her death, runs like a golden thread through many musical works over several centuries.

“Probably, this myth is a record holder in music in terms of its popularity and the number of music citations,” says Ivan Velikanov. “The genre of opera itself arose from a cascade of different works on the same plot - the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. One of the first operas by Claudio Monteverdi is dedicated to it; this legend was embodied in works by such different composers as Heinrich Schütz, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Georg Philipp Telemann, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Haydn, and many others. Ferenc Liszt dedicated a symphonic poem to Orpheus, Jacques Offenbach - an operetta-buff, Igor Stravinsky - a ballet. And this is not a complete list. We have included some compositions of baroque music in our concert programme - from Monteverdi to Mozart. I consider the image of Orpheus to be a good pattern for a concert dedicated to women.”