Philharmonia

The Moscow Philharmonia offers an eclectic range of performances, from classical to jazz, for its 88th season.

The 88th season of the Moscow Philharmonia, the city’s principal purveyor of classical music, got under way in the middle of September and is now in full swing, presenting concerts practically every evening from now until early next summer.

Although principally focused on the classical music repertoire of the 18th to 21st centuries, the Philharmonia’s more than 170 subscription series also encompass jazz, folkloric dance and literary evenings devoted entirely to the spoken word. And while catering primarily to adult audiences, the Philharmonia also presents weekend afternoon concert series especially aimed at introducing younger listeners to the world of classical music.

Subscription series offer a considerable saving in cost compared with the price of tickets purchased separately for the concerts they include. But tickets for every concert on the Philharmonia’s schedule are always made available for individual purchase.

Because of the past year’s economic crisis, the Philharmonia has tightened its belt this season, mainly by presenting fewer musicians from abroad and by temporarily suspending its very successful oratorio series.

Nevertheless, there is much on its schedule for music lovers to look forward to. What follows is a personal choice of what look to be some of the season’s orchestral and vocal highlights.

Among Moscow’s overabundance of full-scale symphony orchestras, three of them, the Russian National Orchestra, the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia and the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, play more or less consistently on a world-class level. The Tchaikovsky Symphony withdrew from the Philharmonia some years ago and presents its concerts independently, but the other two play at least a large share of their Moscow concerts under the Philharmonia’s auspices.

The Russian National Orchestra began its Philharmonia series at Tchaikovsky Hall on Saturday with a program of French classics under the baton of Russian born and trained Vasily Petrenko, the highly regarded chief conductor of Britain’s Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Following him in December will be Vladimir Yurovsky, another British-based conductor of Russian origin who has gained a considerable Moscow following for his superb music-making here in recent seasons. The series also includes concerts led by veteran maestro Vasily Sinaisky, who is well-remembered for his long and distinguished career with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, and by the RNO’s founder, Mikhail Pletnev. A second RNO series takes place at the Moscow Conservatory, with Pletnev mostly in charge.

The National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia plays only one Philharmonia series this season, with a different conductor taking the podium for each of the series’ five concerts at the Moscow Conservatory: the orchestra’s artistic director, Vladimir Spivakov; the often exciting, Romanian-born Ion Marin; British maestro Jan Latham-Koenig, whose conducting of Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at Novaya Opera was probably most responsible for making that production the operatic high point of season before last; Alexander Lazarev, who has my vote as Russia’s greatest living conductor; and Greek-born Teodor Currentzis, who has become something of a cult figure among those who follow his Moscow appearances.

Not to be overlooked are the series at the Conservatory by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, which often plays with great distinction, and by the State Symphonic Capella of Russia, in which the dean of Russian conductors, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, once again serves up a broad array of music that is little-known, but mostly worth hearing.

From smaller-scale orchestral ensembles, both the finest playing and most interesting choice of repertoire are likely to be heard in the series featuring the Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra, under the leadership of both its artistic director, Alexander Rudin, and the renowned British maestro, Sir Roger Norrington.

Musica Viva and Rudin are due to take part in the first event on the Philharmonia’s popular series of opera in concert form, when Rudin leads the orchestra and a group of distinguished foreign soloists in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” a work widely performed abroad, but a rarity in Russia.

The other two operas in the series mark 2010’s “Year of France in Russia”: Charles Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet,” also a seldom-heard work here, and Georges Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers,” an opera of tender beauty that most recently in Moscow endured a truly abominable staging at Novaya Opera.

What has been mentioned above only scratches the surface of the Philharmonia’s vast program of events this season.

And while some of those events feature the usual dose of overly familiar music played by musicians who themselves could be called overly familiar, there is more than enough else that seems likely to bring cheer to audiences in the months ahead. Full information concerning the Philharmonia’s season schedule, in both Russian and English, can be found on its excellent web site, Meloman.ru.

Many of the subscription series have yet to begin, and tickets for most of them can still be ordered online at Bilet@philharmonia.ru and by telephone at +7 (495) 232-0400/699-2262, or purchased in person at the box offices of Tchaikovsky Hall and of the Moscow Conservatory.