Academic choir “The Masters of Choir Singing”
Music director and chief conductor – Lev Kontorovich
Victor Popov Academy of Choral Art

Soloists:
Veronika Dzhioeva, soprano
Ekaterina Morozova, soprano
Irina Polivanova, soprano
Polina Shamaeva, mezzo-soprano
Maria Zaikina, mezzo-soprano
Aleksey Tatarintsev, tenor
Vasily Ladyuk, baritone
Evgeniy Stavinskiy, bass

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is the most widescale work of the composer, in terms of the resources. To perform the Symphony, full symphony orchestra, three choirs, and eight soloists are required. For good reason contemporaries baptized the work “the symphony of thousand participants”. Mahler did confess in a letter, “It’s the most significant work I have ever written… Imagine the Universe starts to sound and tinkle. Not human voices sing now, but suns and planets spinning round in circles”.  

It’s the first time that the Tatar State Symphony Orchestra with Alexander Sladkovsky will perform the Symphony, thus marking a new stage of the collective’s history.

The repertoire of the orchestra includes several Mahler’s symphonies, 1st, 4th, 5th, and 9th.
The recording of the 1st, 4th, and 9th, released by “Melodiya”, received highest critical acclaim both in Russia and abroad. Performed by the Tatar Orchestra, Mahler’s music sounds so authentic and so Vienna-esque that a surprised columnist of Britain’s Musical Opinion magazine wrote “…it’s impossible to believe that the music is played by a Russian orchestra”.

“Mahler was crucial, without him there would be no Shostakovich”, Alexander Sladkovsky believes. “I’m happy that on the debris of the former Tatar Orchestra a really new collective has grown, which is able to perform whole cycles of that level of difficulty. The sole fact that a regional orchestra undertakes such a creative challenge, speaks volumes”.