Opera Tickets Italy

The delightful auditorium of Venice's La Fenice Opera House stages a series of concerts conducted by the Russian-born maestro Stanislav Kochanovsky featuring the music of two Russian greats, Sergei Prokofiev and Pytor Ilych Tchaikovsky. The programme opens with a rendition of Prokfiev's Chout, opus 21, which is the music of the ballet of the same name that debuted at the Gaîté Lyrique Theatre in Paris on 17 May 1921. The ballet was performed by the famous Ballets Russes dance company while the music was conducted by the composer himself. The other work in the programme that Kochanovsky and the superb La Fenice orchestra take on is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake Suite, possibly some of the most recognisable ballet music to have ever been written.

Originally titled as Skazka pro shuta, semerykh shutov pereshutivshego in Russian or The Tale of the Jester Who Outwits Seven Other Jesters, Chout tells the story of seven buffoons who murder their wives thinking, thanks to the advice of an eighth buffoon, that they can be resurrected. Prokofiev's contemporary Igor Stravinsky suggested the idea for Chout to Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, who commissioned Prokofiev to write it. Dissatisfied with Prokofiev's initial composition of 1915, the composer produced a new transcript for it while he was travelling in the United States. When he returned to France, Diaghilev went on to produce the ballet with its new, full orchestration, the music that opens this Venetian concert.

The Swan Lake Suite was produced some seven years after its composer's death. Put together as a concert piece from the much more expansive orchestration for his ballet, this suite features six numbers drawn from the original work. In 1882, Tchaikovsky wrote to a music publisher, Pytor Jurgenson, about the possibility of adapting the ballet into a piano reduction and a full score. Although Jurgenson wrote back approving this idea, it was not until November 1900 that the adapted music appeared in a published form. The suite includes Dances of the Swan from the second act and the waltz-time Valse from the opening act but it is not known whether Jurgenson chose what to include or it was Tchaikovsky himself who selected the six pieces that make up the suite. The earliest recorded performance of the Swan Lake Suite took place at Queen's Hall in London on 1 September 1901.

With two excellent pieces of ballet music, this concert at the Gran Teatro La Fenice under the direction of Stanislav Kochanovsky - who studied at the St.Petersburg Conservatoire and is now considered by many to be among the most exciting conductors of Russian music – is sure to impress all audience members.