Sino-Russian Youth Orchestra

The Sino-Russian Youth Orchestra was formed at the suggestion of Maestro Valery Gergiev as part of an international programme, the Sino-Russian Year of Youth Exchange 2014/2015. The aim of that programme is to establish contact among students of both countries. The Orchestra consists of 50 Russian and 63 Chinese musicians.

The first performance by the group was conducted by Valery Gergiev and took place in March 2014 on the new stage of the new Mariinsky Theatre (Mariinsky II). The Orchestra played Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto (with Daniil Kharitonov as soloist) and a violin concerto by Chinese composers Chen Gang and He Zhanhao called “Butterfly Lovers” (with Xie Haoming as soloist) along with other pieces.

In December 2014 as part of the Prokofiev Festival in Beijing at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) Valery Gergiev led the ensemble in another concert. They performed Prokofiev’s Third and Fifth Symphonies and his Second Piano Concerto. The soloist was the young Chinese pianist Zhang Haochen. Valery Gergiev observed strict neutrality not only in the makeup of the programmes and selection of soloists but also in the orchestra placement: the musicians were seated completely in Russian-Chinese pairs.

This was not the first visit of the Mariinsky Theatre to China. For several years in succession Valery Gergiev has introduced Chinese audiences to the music of Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. In 2008 the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra had opened the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA), and in 2014 Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin” was presented on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in a joint production with the NCPA.