The Columbus Symphony has renamed it's 'Russian Winter Festival' program
Since 2016, the Columbus Symphony’s “Russian Winter Festival” has been a mainstay of its annual programming.
The concerts honor the giants of Russian music, from Pyotr Ilyich Tchiakovsky to Igor Stravinsky.
As part of the symphony’s new season, announced last month, the festival will again be performed but, owing to the current war between Russia and Ukraine, under a different title, said Music Director Rossen Milanov in a recent interview with The Dispatch.
On Jan. 6-7 in the Ohio Theatre, the symphony will perform what is now called its “Winter Festival.”
“We did not call it ‘Russian Winter Festival,’” said Milanov, a native of Bulgaria, a nation on the shores of the Black Sea that was once aligned with the former Soviet Union.
He added: “I think it’s just because people are super-sensitive to this war right now, but . . . the repertoire is essentially the same repertoire that we traditionally do in January.”
During the concerts in January, the symphony will perform works by Russian composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, whose “Violin Concerto No. 1” will be played by Bulgarian violinist Bella Hristova.
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Milanov believes these works and others by Russian composers should remain in circulation regardless of world events.
“What is going on now between Russia and Ukraine is something that we should not mix with what (are) some of the great monuments of world culture,” Milanov said. “If we use the same logic, we should be never performing German music.”
One of the works on the bill, Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 6,” shows that a nation’s artists aren’t necessarily aligned with its leaders. For the piece, Shostakovich used an abstract style that represented a rebuke to those wishing to enlist the composer in a “nationalistic cause,” the symphony’s website noted.
Excerpts from a documentary about the piece will be shown during the concerts.
“There (will) be a documentary here about Shostakovich’s fight against Stalin,” said Milanov, who sees Shostakovich as an example for all artists to emulate.
“Shostakovich was really fighting against all of this injustice during his time,” Milanov said. “I wish that there were more people who would take that kind of exemplary behavior culturally, through their works. I’m sure there is a lot of this (going on). We just don’t know about it.”
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus Symphony renames its 'Russian Winter Festival' progrram
