Hamlet - Performance-concert

The world’s most famous play will take shape of the performance-concert by Evgeny Mironov and the State Symphony Orchestra “Novaya Rossiya” conducted by Yuri Bashmet.

The author of the idea of the performance-concert is Evgeny Mironov, who is performing Hamlet for the third time: the actor has worked with the world’s leading directors Peter Stein and Robert Lepage; in the case with the latter, he tried on all the roles of the Shakespearean tragedy. In the new production by director Marina Brusnikina, he is the reader, whose word amalgamates with the music of Dmitry Shostakovich. The famous composer repeatedly turned to Shakespeare’s works; the orchestra will perform his pieces from the 1967 film of the same name and from the play staged by N. Akimov at the Vakhtangov Theater in 1932.

Thanks to the synthesis of music and words, the tragedy by Shakespeare in five acts thus unfolds before the spectators in a matter of minutes, making it possible to feel the irreversible dissolution of Hamlet’s world.

“The concert version makes it impossible to read or play the entire piece; the music talks for me if I don’t finish saying something and the other way round. The combination of music and words, I hope, will produce an effect that does not occur in a movie or in a dramatic performance – this is the opportunity to give this tragic story both a dimensional and a focused view. In this concise poetic musical narrative, I am facing a difficult task as an artist: I need to touch each character, get into them for a while, and then drop the character and immediately get into another one, while being a partner to Shostakovich’s brilliant music.”

Evgeny Mironov

“First of all, it is a great pleasure for me to work with Zhenya Mironov and to build up a new project with him. Hamlet is a fantastic theme. And the music is incredibly powerful. Shostakovich created a real masterpiece that enables us to fill it with new emotion; it gives our performance-concert a special rhythm.”

Yuri Bashmet