21 July 2016, Thursday

Tugan Sokhiev is the Music Director of the performance and a mastermind behind the idea of staging opera by Berlioz at The Bolshoi for the first time.

We give the floor to Maestro:
"Berlioz is one of my favorite composers. Had it not been for him, we would not know that romantic - and not only romantic - music we love today. Berlioz's influence on the entire future development of music (Ravel and Debussy included), its stylistics and expressive means, is impossible to overstate. And Berlioz was virtually a contemporary of Beethoven's (he began to write Huit scenes de Faust when Beethoven was still alive)!

The plot of La Damnation de Faust acted as a stimulus for the expression of feelings by which Berlioz himself was perturbed. It was not the Faust story as such which interested the composer, but rather the emotional state of the main characters and the more striking (in his view) stage situations. And that is why the storyline is so compressed, or rather jumps - as do Faust and Méphistophélès - from scene to scene.

You can read very detailed Sokhiev's interview in a new issue of �The Bolshoi Theatre' magazine (page 47):

Photo by Damir Yusupov

Details on premiere and tickets: