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KSENIJA SIDOROVA,
accordion
Latvian-native accordionist Ksenija Sidorova
was introduced to the instrument and its folk
traditions by her grandmother and began tak-
ing lessons at age under the guidance of Marija
Gasele in her hometown of Riga. Before long,
her desire to learn more about classical and con-
temporary repertoire for the accordion led her
to London’s Royal Academy of Music, where she
studied with Owen Murray, won several prizes
as an undergraduate, and subsequently com-
pleted a master’s degree with distinction. Her
honors have also included both the Philharmo-
nia Orchestra’s Martin Musical Scholarship and
Friends of the Philharmonia Award, as well as
the Worshipful Company of Musicians Silver
Medal. Sidorova became the rst winner of the
Bryn Terfel Foundation’s International Award in
, and in
she performed at the singer’s
th birthday celebration at Royal Albert Hall,
appearing alongside Sting and many other art-
ists. Sidorova regularly collaborates with guitar-
ist Miloš Karadaglić, tenors Juan Diego Florez
and Joseph Calleja, clarinetist Andreas Ottensa-
mer, and violinists Nicola Benedetti and om-
as Gould, with a repertoire spanning from Bach
to Piazzolla, as well as contemporaries such as
Erkki-Sven Tüür and Arturs Maskats. Together
with Avi Avital and Itamar Doari, she formed
a trio for the “Between Worlds” project, which
they recently toured to Shakespeare’s Globe and
throughout Germany and the United States, and
this season she performed a live set with Brazil-
ian DJ Gui Boratto at La Cigale in Paris. Hav-
ing made her Wigmore Hall debut in
, she
made her rst appearance at Lincoln Center’s
Mostly Mozart Festival last summer and contin-
ued the recital tour to the MITO and Macerata
Festivals, Baden-Baden, Lucerne, Paris, Salz-
burg, and Birmingham. Recent orchestral high-
lights include a tour with the Estonian Festival
Orchestra under Paavo Järvi and engagements
with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, MDR
Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tonkün-
stler Orchestra, and the Luxembourg, Monte
Carlo, Stuttgart, and Wrocław Philharmonics.
Ksenija Sidorova made her Ravinia debut in
, touring her Deutsche Grammophon–de-
but album,
Carmen
.
Angeles. Other planned arrangements for dance
band and voice never transpired.
SERGEY VOITENKO (b. 1973)
Revelation
ough born in the village of Bogdanovka in the
Ne egorsk District of Russia, singer, songwriter,
and accordionist Sergey Voitenko calls the city
of Samara home. At an early age, he learned to
play accordion, hockey, judo, sambo, and soc-
cer. As Honored Artist of the Samara Region
(the rst musician to receive that recognition),
Voitenko serves as Samara’s ambassador to the
FIFA World Cup in Russia.
Voitenko organized the First International Festi-
val of Accordion Music “Vivat Bayan” in the Sa-
mara region in
/ , and he has spearheaded
e orts to open a bayan museum in the city to
mark the
th anniversary of the instrument’s
invention (
) by Pavel Chulkov in Samara.
As a member of the accordion duo Bayan Mix
with Dmitri Khramkov, Voitenko ranked third
in the qualifying rounds of the
Eurovision
Song Contest and second in the
contest.
ALFRED SCHNITTKE (1934–98)
Revis Fairy Tale
(transcribed by Yuri Shishkin, Friedrich Lips, and
Ksenija Sidorova)
Nineteenth-century author Nikolai Gogol
(
– ) painted an un attering, satirical pic-
ture of the social structure in imperial Russia in
e Wanderings of Chichikov, or Dead Souls—
Poema
(
). Modeled on Homer’s
Odyssey
and
Dante’s
e Divine Comedy
in its poetic verse
form and epic scope,
Dead Souls
follows the
meanderings of the middle-aged, middle-class,
and thoroughly corrupt Pavel Ivanovich Chichi-
kov, who purchases the names of deceased serfs
(i.e., “dead souls”) from landowners in a small
provincial town called “N.” Gogol sets his poem
in the period between the seventh o cial cen-
sus ( ) and the eighth o cial census ( ).
Serfs who died between censuses remained on
the tax rolls, so selling their “dead souls” provid-
ed tax relief for the landowners while allowing
Chichikov to assemble an imaginary “estate” in
Crimea, populated in name only by these “dead
souls,” against which he planned to secure a
large loan from the state treasury and escape
with the money before the next census could
uncover his scheme.
More than a century later, composer Alfred
Schnittke wrote incidental music for a
theatrical adaptation of
Dead Souls
, called
e
Inspector’s Tale
, which Soviet authorities banned
before it could be staged.
e conductor Gen-
nady Rozhdestvensky later assembled an or-
chestral suite from this incidental music, which,
with additional music by Schnittke, formed the
basis of a one-act ballet (he dubbed it a “choreo-
graphic fantasia”) entitled
Esquisses
(
Sketches
),
produced in celebration of the
th anniversa-
ry of Gogol’s birth. Choreographed by Andrei
Petrov in
,
Esquisses
introduced characters
from
Dead Souls
as well as Gogol’s play
e
Government Inspector
( ) and short stories
e Overcoat
(
),
Diary of a Madman
( ),
and
e Nose
( – ).
e accordionists Yuri
Shishkin, Friedrich Lips, and Ksenija Sidorova
transcribed four movements from this ballet for
their suite
Revis Fairy Tale
.
–Program notes ©
Todd E. Sullivan
Sergey Voitenko
Portrait of Alfred Schnittke by Reginald Gray (1972)
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