On Sunday, February 5, the Hvorostovsky Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre’s new project for chamber vocal music fans starts. It’s called Meetings at the Piano. The first event of the project is dedicated to Sergei Rachmaninoff.

This choice was made because April 1, 2023 marks the 150th birthday of the composer. The authors of the project are accompanist Eugenia Solunskaya and opera soloist Inna Spodina. They’re going to include vocal miniatures by Rachmaninoff: popular romance songs (such as Do Not Sing, Beauty based on poems by Pushkin and In the Silence of the Secret Night based on poems by Fet), and the rarely performed ones.

Drama works based on poems by the classical authors of the 19th and 20th centuries (Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Afanasy Fet, Alexei Pleshcheev, Alexei Apukhtin, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and others) will be performed at the meeting. The concert programme also includes a comic song based on Pyotr Vyazemsky’s poems Did You Hiccup, Natasha, as well as experimental miniatures in which the composer used prose texts: Letter to Stanislavsky and We Will Rest. Rachmaninoff wrote a kind of soundtrack to his own letter to Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky and the one to the fragment of Sonya's monologue at the end of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya.

Anna Avakyan, Aliona Babivskaya, Daria Ryabinko, Inna Spodina, Denis Grechishkin, Sergei Telenkov will take part in the concert. It’ll end with the famous Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise performed by four soloists.

The second concert of the Meetings at the Piano cycle called Under the Sky of Paris (to be held on March 11) will be quite consonant with International Women's Day on March 8, for it will unite the most beautiful vocal lyrics by French composers: Francis Poulenc, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré.