Andrey Boreyko, with whom I shared the podium for one week.
It seems that every time I conduct The Cleveland Orchestra, I share the stage with a bunch of actors and either a laser show or some kind of multimedia performance. A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to work in a "Beyond the Score" production which highlighted the creative process and the circumstances around the birth of Prokofiev's 5th symphony. The production came from Chicago, and it was done with local actors and pianist playing the roles of Sergey Prokofiev and other characters.
Besides playing excerpts from the 5th symphony itself, we performed parts of Prokofiev's other symphonies and ballet works, as well as some music by other Russian composers, and the audience was treated with film clips and stills from Soviet times. It was a highly interesting task and I learned a lot about the background of this work, especially by the way of composer's piano sketches that were played live onstage amidst orchestral excerpts.
The only problem in this kind of production is that, as always with history, the storyline is an interpretation of the many times contradicting "facts" that we have from those times, as became clear in my conversations with the week's guest conductor, Andrey Boreyko. The Chicago production leaned towards the official party line that the symphony is an optimistic hymn to the mankind, as opposed to the idea prevalent in modern day Russia, that the ending of the symphony represents the never-stopping killing machinery of the Soviet dictator Josif Stalin. All I can say is, go listen to this amazing piece of music - and choose your pick!
Working side by side with maestro Boreyko was a great pleasure despite the extremely tight rehearsal schedules we had that week. Coincidentally, we share the same place of study - the St Petersburg "Rimsky-Korsakov" State Conservatory in Russia, and thus we were familiar with same teachers and conductors from that part of the world - and I also had a chance to brush up my Russian a bit! Boreyko conducted the orchestra in three subscription concerts in addition to the one we shared, and was very much appreciated not only by our local newspaper but also by the very young crowd we performed to at the Finney Chapel in the nearby town of Oberlin. Another highlight of the week was meeting the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks whose English horn concerto was performed by Robert Walters and the TCO. Very interesting, gentle personality... I hope to meet both of them soon again!
