From July 31 to August 7, the Festival Internacional de Santander, in Spain, opened its doors to an original project developed at the initiative of the Opera Royal de Wallonie (Liege, Belgium), the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Centre and the festival itself.
The principal element of the project was a production of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov with acclaimed Italian bass Ruggero Raimondi in the title role and soloists from opera theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg, many of whom were recent graduates of the Opera Centre: Anastasia Privoznova, Alina Shakirova, Sergei Atyushev, Konstantin Brzhinsky, Oleg Dolgov, Yury Zaltsman, Maxim Kuzmin-Karabayev, Sergei Polyakov, Ruslan Roziyev, Maxim Sazhin and Alexei Tikhomirov. The production was staged by Romanian director Petrika Ionesco and conducted by Italian maestro Paolo Arrivabene.
The second part of the project was a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, with soloists Alexei Tikhomirov (Pimen in Boris Godunov), Alina Shakirova (Hostess of the Inn in Boris Godunov), Belgian tenor Marco Laho and American soprano Monique McDonald.
The project concluded with solo concerts by the Russian singers, accompanied by the Opera Centre’s Svetlana Chernova, who actively took part in preparing Boris Godunov and the Requiem and whose efforts were highly praised by the other partners in the project.