For the opening of the festival, St. Petersburg’s world-famous Philharmonic Orchestra performed for the first time in a new venue — the concert hall of Annecy’s Bonlieu Theatre. Just a few hours prior to the official opening of the festival, the Campus Annecy youth orchestra, led by Fayçal Karoui, had been playing there. Young listeners had been taking part in the Campus Annecy program and some of them had even had the chance to be involved in conducting the orchestra.

Domingo Hindoyan, a young conductor from Venezuela, conducted the evening concert, given by the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.

The evening program included works by French and Russian composers. The concert opened with Gabriel Fauré’s incidental music for Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Pelléas and Melisande, and that was followed by a performance from the charming Naughton Sisters, pianists Christina and Michelle (USA). They gave a sensitive rendering of François Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra. From the very first bars at the piano, this duo electrified the audience. The refined playing of the Naughton Sisters, their rich sound and the vivid colours of their music’s timbre could not possibly have left any members of the audience unmoved.

For their encore, the two sisters treated the audience to a magnificent performance of Witold Lutosławski’s complex and virtuoso Variations on a Theme by Paganini.

The piece of music played at the end of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic’s concert, conducted by Domingo Hindoyan, was Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony in G minor — ‘Winter Dreams’ characterized by its elegiac intonation and stirring Russian melodies.

Victor Alexandrov, the AVC Charity Foundation music reviewer