For the orchestra, the past year passed under the sign of Mahler: four of his symphonies were performed at the Rakhlin Seasons festival, at the Rakhlin Seasons, at the recently completed Seventh tour, and in January-February of the new year. He also plays the Second. Why Mahler?
Alexander Sladkovsky: I have been studying Mahler for a long time, in 2011 I opened my second season of work with the Tatarstan State Orchestra with his symphony in Kazan. For me, Mahler is the pinnacle of orchestral performance, the most difficult thing in symphonic music, if we talk about the classics, the romanticism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His ten symphonies and “Song of the Earth” are of an absolutely cosmic level. To develop a team, it is necessary to set goals as high as possible. Every season I tried to play one of Mahler’s symphonies. Now that a large collection has already been assembled, we have plans for a full cycle of Mahler’s symphonies, not just played once, but included in the permanent repertoire. I would like to record them, but there were problems with the record labels we were working with.
Have no idea to create your own label?
Alexander Sladkovsky: We are working in this direction, and we will be the first under the orchestra label to release a Rachmaninoff vinyl album for the anniversary: ”Symphonic Dances”, the Third Symphony and more. Other plans are to place Beethoven’s symphonies on Internet sites. But my dream is Mahler: first I want to play everything, then write it. There is a lot of work ahead, not only with the orchestra, but also with the choirs and soloists. I love huge, unrealistic challenges. We have already recorded 12 CD boxes with music by Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Tatar music.
The main hero of the upcoming musical year is Sergei Rachmaninov. What unusual is planned at the “White Lilac” festival?
Alexander Sladkovsky: The main innovation is the participation of the laureates of the First Rachmaninoff Competition. The opening concert on May 13, for example, will be conducted by the Chinese Haoran Li, and the winner in the piano nomination will also play (the specific name will be known later. – Approx. ed.). Performance with the Tatarstan Orchestra is his special prize awarded at the Rachmaninov Competition.
And in March, you and your orchestra are planning Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony?
Alexander Sladkovsky: I love her. In fact, my career started with this symphony. She was in the program of the first round of the Prokofiev Competition and it was she who took me on a special wave to the second round (Alexander Sladkovsky became the winner of this competition in 1999. – Approx. ed.). And six months earlier, in October 1998, on the day of my 33rd birthday, I heard this symphony on the last tour of the State Orchestra with Evgeny Svetlanov at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Unforgettable!
You will open next year with the Rachmaninov program: on January 7-8, together with Denis Matsuev and Ivan Bessonov, you will play almost all of Rachmaninov’s concerts on Sirius, in the Great Hall of the Park of Sciences and Arts. You already have everything planned before the beginning of June. But it is noticeable that you invite very different conductors to the orchestra: these are Ivan Rudin, Alessandro Cadario from Milan, the Dutchman Konrad van Alphen, the director of the Belgrade Opera Dejan Savic, the Armenian conductor Eduard Topchyan, the Australian Tom Woods. How do you manage to invite such an impressive number of colleagues from different countries to Kazan in the current situation?
Alexander Sladkovsky: I have always had a policy of expanding horizons. For example, while working on the jury for the Rachmaninov Competition, I met my American colleague George Pehlivanyan. He did not come to Russia for almost 30 years, he has never been to Kazan. He invited him to the Concordia festival and he successfully conducted one of the concerts. By the way, my main guest will be another jury member of this competition, Australian Christopher Chen. It is important for me that the people who stand on the podium of our orchestra are not just conductors, but well-known personalities, teachers, so that everyone brings a new idea of u200bu200bmusic. And I am glad that so many great musicians come to Kazan and then, traveling around the world, talk about our orchestra.
Well-known conductors who performed for the first time with the Tatarstan orchestra this year, for example, Dmitry Liss, Valery Polyansky, note that the orchestra has excellent orchestral discipline, the musicians are used to listening to each other and to the conductor.
Alexander Sladkovsky: There can be no orchestral performance without this. It’s like football, when everyone knows their task every second, but at the same time they also improvise, trying to do everything as well as possible. It’s like a good team, yes.
