The year 2025 marks the musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir’s 20th anniversary — on the 31st of January 2005, the inaugural concert of new ensembles under the artistic direction of Teodor Currentzis took place in Novosibirsk.
In late January and early February, Dom Radio at 62 Nevsky Prospect hosted a revival of The Dedication Ceremony to Paul Celan featuring the choir and orchestra soloists, concerts of modern choral music Fighting the World conducted by Olga Vlasova, as well as concerts of the Baroque instrumentation with a programme dedicated to Salamone Rossi, the Italian composer at the turn of the 16th and the 17th centuries. The musicAeterna Brass ensemble has performed in St Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Sochi.
On 13 February 2025, the musicAeterna Orchestra led by guest conductor Alexander Sladkovsky performed Shostakovich’s Symphony №10 and the Violin Concerto №1 at the St Petersburg Capella. The solo violin part was performed by Olga Volkova.
Finally, on the 8th of March, the extensive Anniversary Tour of the orchestra and choir under the direction of Teodor Currentzis began. Mahler’s Symphony №2, featuring soprano Sofya Tsygankova and mezzo Yulia Vakula, was performed in Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk (10 March), Perm (12 March) and Moscow (14 and 15 March). In St Petersburg, in addition to Mahler (17 March), the orchestra performed Bruckner’s Symphony № 9 (20 March). With these two works the musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir proceeded with the tour in Spain: from 23 to 29 March they performed in Barcelona, Madrid, and Oviedo. The soloists in Mahler’s Symphony №2 were soprano Sofya Tsygankova and mezzo Maria Barakova.
By the beginning of the Anniversary Tour, a large book dedicated to the history and phenomenon of musicAeterna was published, containing rare photographs, extensive materials on the history of the ensembles, and analytical essays by leading musicologists.
In St Petersburg, on the 8th, 9th and 10th of March 2025, the musicAeterna Dance presented the premiere of Anastasia Peshkova’s dance performance Shame starring prima ballerina Daria Pavlenko in the atrium of the Hermitage General Staff Building.
On the 8th and 9th April, the Baroque instrumentation of the orchestra performed Tafelmusik by Bieber and Telemann at Dom Radio, 62 Nevsky Prospect, and on the 15th and 16th April the musicAeterna choir presented a programme of sacred music by Poulenc and Britten in Moscow at Zotov Centre. The musicAeterna Contemporana, conducted by Fyodor Lednev, performed the programme Quiet Music at Dom Radio on the 18th and 19th of April, and on the 26th and 27th of April, Easter concerts of the musicAeterna Byzantina choir and the musicAeterna women’s choir conducted by Teodor Currentzis with the programme The Angel Cried took place at Dom Radio.
The new programme of the musicAeterna Orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis — Tchaikovsky’s Symphony №5 and Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs (featuring soprano Diana Nosyreva) – was performed on the 11th of May in Tashkent, the 13th and 15th of May in St Petersburg, the 17th and 18th of May in Moscow.
On the 22nd and 23rd of May at Dom Radio at 62 Nevsky Prospect, the musicAeterna Dance presented the premiere of the dance performance YUL by Marcel and Maria Nureyev.
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”><img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-21876″ src=”https://musicaeterna.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/©olga-kramskaya_01614-1-scaled.jpg” alt=”” width=”2560″ height=”1707″ /> </span><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>
</span>
On th 9th and 10th of June, with a concert performance of the programme Hændel. A Dedication Ceremony to George Frideric Handel the musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir conducted by Teodor Currentzis closed the St Petersburg season. As part of these concerts, a new major musicAeterna project, the Anton Rubinstein Academy for vocalists, was presented to the public. The soloists of the programme were the participants of the Academy’s first enrollment — Sofya Tsygankova, Yulia Vakula, Diana Nosyreva, Iveta Simonyan, Tatyana Bikmukhametova, Ksenia Dorodova, as well as Andrey Nemzer, the soloist of the musicAeterna Choir and the vocal coach of the Academy.
<img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-21875″ src=”https://musicaeterna.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/dsc09527_©lyuda-burchenkova-scaled.jpg” alt=”” width=”2560″ height=”1707″ />
The Hændel production, this time directed by Elizaveta Moroz and featuring the musicAeterna Dance, opened the Diaghilev Festival programme in Perm on the 13th and 14th of June. At the Diaghilev Festival 2025, musicAeterna residents, director Anna Guseva and choreographer Anastasia Peshkova, staged Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson et Dalila with the Perm Opera troupe, while director Nina Vorobyova and conductor Ilya Gaisin presented the premiere of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, starring the musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir artists. The festival featured a dance performance Shame by musicAeterna Dance and Anastasia Peshkova, as well as a one-woman performance directed by Elizaveta Moroz Marina Tsvetaeva’s Evening Assembly under the musical direction of Evgeny Vorobyov. Soloists and ensembles of the orchestra artists, including the musicAeterna Brass ensemble, performed concert programmes with music from several centuries ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Marko Nikodijević, in Perm and Cherdyn. On the 22nd of June, the festival ended with the Esperia enigma concert, in which the musicAeterna Choir and Orchestra, as well as the musicAeterna Dance, performed under the direction of Teodor Currentzis. The multidisciplinary production was staged by Anna Guseva.
