13 April 2016

The Mariinsky Theatre’s tour to Great Britain will be a celebration of Prokofiev

The latest Mariinsky Theatre tour to Great Britain runs from 14 to 18 April in London and Cardiff.

The Mariinsky Ballet will be returning to the Wales Millennium Centre (Cardiff), where the company will present works by contemporary choreographers. On 14 and 15 April at the Donald Gordon Theatre, Mariinsky Ballet soloists will perform the one-act ballets Five Tangos by Hans van Manen, Infra by Wayne McGregor and In the Night by Jerome Robbins for the first time for UK audiences.

On 16 and 17 April the company will present Sasha Waltz’s production of Sacre and Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH. The Mariinsky Orchestra will be conducted by Valery Gergiev. The tour will feature appearances by principal dancers and lead soloists of the Mariinsky Theatre including Yekaterina Kondaurova, Anastasia Matvienko, Viktoria Tereshkina, Kristina Shapran, Andrei Yermakov, Konstantin Zverev, Kimin Kim, Alexander Sergeyev, Yuri Smekalov, Filipp Stepin and Vladimir Shklyarov.

The Mariinsky Orchestra is preparing a surprise for its British fans. At the matinee concert on 17 April at the Donald Gordon Theatre there will be a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s symphonic tale Peter and the Wolf under Valery Gergiev, who will appear in the dual role of Narrator and conductor. The programme also includes the suite from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. The next day the orchestra under the baton of maestro Gergiev will continue to perform works by Prokofiev – at Cadogan Hall in London there will be a performance of the music of the ballet Romeo and Juliet.

These performances open a series of celebratory concerts in Great Britain to mark one hundred and twenty-five years since the birth of Sergei Prokofiev. On its next visit to London in autumn 2016 the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will perform all of the composer’s symphonies.