First show " little prince was held in February in Sochi at the Bashmet Arts Festival. And after the presentation in Moscow, the project is planned to be included in the repertoire of Sovremennik. However, due to the high employment of both Khabensky and Bashmet, the Little Prince will be shown infrequently.

AT Concert hall named after Tchaikovsky Yuri Bashmet and Konstantin Khabensky for the first time presented their joint project to the general public.

It was not a premiere, but ... a premiere. Joint literary- musical project Bashmet and Khabensky has existed for two years, but Muscovites could see it only twice, and on very specific chamber sites - on " December evenings"and in" Barvikha Luxury Village ". And although the project has already managed to receive the Oleg Yankovsky award, only now there is an opportunity to see it in a large concert hall.

The backstory is this. Bashmet, after an accidental improvisation at one of the presentations, suggested famous actor to do something joint, and Khabensky, who had not previously been seen in the reading business, agreed with pleasure. Since Khabensky played Caligula in Yuri Butusov's performance at the St. Petersburg Lensoviet Theater since 1998, they started with Camus' Caligula. Khabensky suggested taking Schubert's string quartet "Death and the Girl" as musical accompaniment, and Bashmet liked the idea. Of course, the arrangement for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler was more suitable for the Moscow Soloists.

Khabensky deliberately distanced himself from any association with the performance, and indeed from any attempts to “play” something. He reads. The text is pronounced evenly, almost without intonation, detached and informative. Something like this in the performances of Roman Viktyuk, the actors dispassionately pronounce the text and play “disturbing music”. The music is really filled with feelings of anxiety and anticipation of death. Yuri Bashmet himself had previously admitted more than once: “I am still at a loss as to why Schubert called his string quartet “Death and the Maiden”. His music is not about a girl, not about death, and at the same time - about a girl, and about death, about birth, suffering, overcoming. She is about a person. Universal".

A quartet is essentially a symphony of several songs, a genre invented by Schubert. The second part is, in fact, Schubert's early song "Death and the Maiden", the last - the incredible power of "Dance of Death". It is here that the tragedy is fully revealed, which surprisingly fits the scene of the death of a tyrant. And Khabensky here no longer refrains from screams, ominous whispers and almost laughter. And the Moscow Soloists sound full-bodied, without restraining themselves, with an open sound.

At the end of the first half of the concerto, again late Schubert - sonata "Arpegione" for viola and strings, this time without Khabensky. Bashmet himself took up the viola. As always, confessionally and especially sincerely. "Arpegione" emphasized the aftertaste of "Caligula", became to some extent relaxation, but sad and thoughtful.

And the whole second half of the concert was occupied by a brilliant performance of why parents brought their children to this concert, who obviously missed Caligula. Namely, a great zoological fantasy for orchestra and a reader Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, one of the most famous works "for children", although written by Saint-Saens for a cheerful secular party in the house of Pauline Viardot. Last year, Bashmet played it at a festival in Khabarovsk, where Artem Vargaftik played the text literally by roles in the Tyuz style.

Khabensky went the other way. All this joke text, akin to the current radio show of Ksenia Sobchak, filled with irony and political jokes for the insiders, Khabensky elegantly updated. Sharp maxims about british empire and elephants in a china shop sounded unexpectedly fresh and extremely sharp, causing almost nervous laughter in the hall.

The Moscow Soloists, supplemented by pianists Igor Gorsky and Ksenia Bashmet, played Khabensky with pleasure, and they themselves smiled no less than the audience. Of course, "The Swan" became the central musical number, here Bashmet was distracted from conducting, took the viola and soloed (not all cellos do this here) absolutely brilliantly. Found a place and incredible story- Khabensky sat down at the piano to Gorsky, and Yuri - to his daughter, and a bravura slovenly improvisation sounded with eight hands. Both of them also conducted the orchestra together, arm in arm! And the "Final" was repeated for an encore.

The program of Bashmet and Khabensky is truly unique. The highest level of music-making is combined with Khabensky's subtle ironic approach to reading texts, giving rise to new meanings and shades. It would be extremely interesting to see new fruits of cooperation of this tandem.

In the Tchaikovsky Hall, Yuri Bashmet and Konstantin Khabensky presented their literary and musical experiment - not a performance, and not a concert in the usual sense.

They go on stage together to conduct their "experiment": this is how Yuri Bashmet and Konstantin Khabensky call this unusual performance, where there are only two main characters - music and literature.

Franz Schubert and Albert Camus. Two geniuses who lived at different times and in different countries. Their names are rarely found in one sentence - not like the fruits of their creativity on the same stage. However, two years ago, Konstantin Khabensky and Yuri Bashmet decided to change this state of affairs. A literary and musical project was created - Schubert's quartet "Death and the Maiden" arranged by Mahler for string orchestra was combined with the play "Caligula" by Camus. With his "Moscow Soloists" this concert program Yuri Bashmet has already shown in Helsinki, Perm, St. Petersburg and Moscow, but, he says, every performance is the same as the first.

“Get used to the fact that someone on the stage is interfering all the time, you need to play quietly, and someone is talking, someone is suddenly screaming. Enclosing the text is like filming a literary classic,” says Bashmet.

For Konstantin Khabensky, the role of Caligula is not new material. Emperor, who dreams of "living in truth", he played for ten years on the stage of the St. Petersburg Theater. Lensoviet. To the question of what is in common between a performance and a musical-dramatic action, the answer is laconically - only the text. When the main partner on the stage is music, the usual laws of the theater do not apply.

"This is quite a mathematical story, because you need to get into pauses, into time and so on. But with all this, in each run we have some new things - this is improvisation, we observe how someone works, and smiles arise sometimes," says the artist.

Twenty minutes of intermission - and he is no longer recognizable. Konstantin Khabensky is now not Caligula or Helikon, but a mocking storyteller with a careless hairdo. Entertainer in the zoological garden, where they arranged a holiday - "Carnival of the Animals".

Text and music - Camille Saint-Saens. The composer wrote his zoological fantasy for the day of the Catholic holiday Mardi Gras, an analogue of the Russian Maslenitsa. He was a little embarrassed about his works and, fearing to be branded as a "frivolous" author, he forbade the publication of "Carnival of Animals" during his lifetime.

The experiment, the results of which are developing from concert to concert, Yuri Bashmet and Konstantin Khabensky promise to carry out more than once. They say that the very form of work turned out to be too attractive. After all, the musician in it is a bit of an actor. And the actor is almost a musician.

The Daile Theater in Riga hosted a tour of a performance that many will not forget for a very long time. It's not that common, by the way. The performance of the Moscow theater "Sovremennik" "Do not leave your planet" based on the truly legendary story by Antoine de Saint-Exupery "The Little Prince" was shown National artist Russia Konstantin Khabensky and Yuri Bashmet with the Moscow Soloists Chamber Ensemble.

The two artists together are not the first time in the Latvian capital - four years ago they came with a joint concert at the Opera, Konstantin Khabensky, to the music of Schubert and Saint-Saens, read fragments from Caligula by Albert Camus.

I remember that then, in response to the question whether the two artists were preparing any new program, Khabensky sincerely exclaimed: “Of course, we are preparing, and preparations are already underway!” And Bashmet quietly turned towards his colleague and remarked with humor: "Don't ... Konstantin, don't say ...". And the artist immediately picked up: “Yes, but all this, of course, will not be so fast, it cannot be done in one evening. After all, it's one thing to just read the text in the pauses of the music, it's quite another thing that I personally find interesting - to swim in the music without disturbing the Maestro. Therefore, there is still serious homework to be done.”

So they, a great violist and a wonderful artist, coexist both in life and on stage. Feel each other instantly, not all professionals have this happens. The same is true in the performance - the text of the great Frenchman was so harmoniously combined with the music!

“I remember the first rehearsal with Konstantin,” says Yuri Abramovich. - Then I felt like a conductor of a choreographic performance, when during the performance of music the conductor must still have time to see whether the ballerina jumped or not. There may be some difficulties in the process of performing, but when it’s difficult for me, it becomes interesting.”

Before the performance, a meeting with the press was scheduled, but for once Bashmet did not come, he remained in the hotel room. Khabensky was lonely and ... nervous. He remarked to a belated journalist: “You were late, what kind of decency?”

“Absolutely different feeling from reading a book at school and when you returned to it during rehearsals! Khabensky told about his experience of reading The Little Prince. - absolutely different levels perception. You understand that this is absolutely not children's literature, and I think that children should not be allowed to read this literature until a certain age. In order not to make any wrong, clogged, stereotyped conclusions about what a person wanted to say by writing this small but rather deep work. One might even say that some in simple words a man wrote a confession of his life. Which has been turned into a fairy tale. The result is often things taken out of context. They are perceived as a kind of “let's be friends at home”, in fact, all this is completely wrong if you read the work calmly, not under orders, but at a certain age.

And one more unexpected nuance - according to Khabensky, this is a work that men should read.

“First of all, this is a male work,” the artist believes. - And as practice shows, we were not mistaken. The female half of the audience was divided into two parts. One says: yes, it's beautiful, but nothing more, the second part thinks it's beautiful, and that's about it. Men are more unanimous in their perception of what we offer from the scene.”

About music, Khabensky replied that he had complicated relationship with her.

"I have big gaps in music education and I'm not shy about talking about it," he said. “But in small steps I am getting closer to understanding what are the subtleties of the rehearsal process of the orchestra led by Yuri Abramovich.”

The staging by Viktor Kramer (his own set design and costumes) amazed many in the best way possible. There were no crying men, and the majority of women were simply fascinated by the one and a half hour action, which contained a maximum of emotions. Apparently, nevertheless, the Riga public does not differ much by gender, and this is not so bad.

Here we have a story about what some of us are afraid to admit to ourselves. As Khabensky said, "everyone has his own baobab." A heartfelt dialogue with Fox, a performer in a flight suit, stranded on a lonely planet in endless space. Loneliness to the music of the piercing "Adagietto" from Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony. And a large ball depicting the planet, which is carried on its back by its owner.

Some later pondered whether it was a staged "trick" or an accident, but at the climax Khabensky went down to the hall and turned heartily to one of the spectators: "Hello, friend!" In any case, the artist and the audience immediately embraced sincerely.

On October 15, I had the chance to listen to a concert by Yuri Bashmet and Konstantin Khabensky. After the Symphony Forum, which took place at the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic at the end of September, I, that the music of bowed instruments sounds to me like foreign language without a translator. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that there are works "with a translator".
In the first part, Joseph Haydn's work "The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross" sounded. Initially, the work was written for performance in a Catholic cathedral and was supposed to frame a priest's sermon, so it was built according to the scheme "text fragment - musical fragment". Konstantin Khabensky read passages from the Bible both detached and immersed, interacting with the musicians, but not merging with the music. It seemed that he really "translated" from the language of notes into the language of words. And these words helped to plunge deeper into the music, to feel the Jerusalem heat with my skin, to see the crowd and the condemned. And there was light in the music. Soft, dense, not at all burning light. The tragedy of the words was slightly erased, as if the music was saying: everything is not so scary. Everything will still be fine. However, the pain of words is so captivating that after "I thirst!" dry lips and rough tongue...

After "Seven Words ..." the artists were not allowed to take a break for several minutes, until Konstantin Khabensky interrupted the flurry of applause, smiling charmingly and declaring into the microphone: "Intermission!"

In the second part, Saint-Saens sounded, "Carnival of the Animals" - a work completely opposite in spirit to "Seven Words ...". "Carnival of Animals" is an ironic, or even sarcastic musical fantasy, where, on a par with animals, and pianists. It is the form that unites both parts of the concerto: music plus words. Only in Saint-Saens the words are formed into light ironic verses, with which the performers played as best they could. For example, under the "Royal March of the Lion", a smiling Yuri Bashmet appeared on the stage, bowing slightly on the line "and terribly sweet, like all tyrants." In the fragment about pianists, both Bashmet and Khabensky sat down at the piano (there were two pianos)), easily and naturally joining the game. No wonder the program warned that in this concert-experiment "a musician is a bit of an actor, and an actor is a bit of a musician." And in the finale, the ironic spirit of the work reached its climax, the “play in the mirror” was added to the music and poems - the public, as it were, was invited to look at themselves from the side at those moments when especially enthusiastic spectators begin to photograph everything and everyone. Khabensky began to photograph the hall on his phone! And then he ran up to the musicians in turn and took selfies with them! I sat and thought: "Oh, just don't laugh out loud,"