This year, the organizers of the 'ENERGY OF DISCOVERIES' festival decided to pay close
attention to the works of Leonid Polovinkin. A major Russian composer, one of the leaders of
the Russian musical avant-garde, Leonid Polovinkin was very popular in the second half of the
20s-early 30s of the last century. His music was widely known in our country and abroad.
However, the fate of the composer and his legacy was tragic.
The composer himself escaped repressions, but it was his music that was repressed. It completely disappeared from concert venues. Polovinkin was forced to radically change his musical language, genre priorities, and many of his compositions lay on archival shelves for decades unknown, unpublished, and often never performed.
As part of the 'ENERGY OF DISCOVERIES' festival, the Orpheus Radio team and Unipro PJSC carried out scrupulous work to search for and recreate unknown works by Leonid Polovinkin. The Orpheus Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the Merited Artist of Russia Sergei Kondrashev recorded a CD. The absolute historical and cultural significance of the musical material did not allow the organizers to limit themselves to the CD release. The stage embodiment of Leonid Polovinkin’s music was called 'The Ship of Happiness'.
The authors of the idea, based on real events from the life of Leonid Polovinkin, appealed, perhaps, to one of the happiest periods in the life of the composer. In the 30s of the twentieth century, he worked in the Moscow Children's Theatre directed by Natalia Sats. They became infatuated with each other and their romance developed rapidly. The action of the play 'The Ship of Happiness' takes place on the Cap Arcona steamer, which makes a long sea passage from Hamburg to Argentina.
The lovers, a well-known composer and a popular young director, are heading to a major international festival, where they will stage two opera performances at the Colon Theater. This is the time when you want to create, bind with the feeling of exciting freedom beyond the political intrigues and restrictions of the Soviet state!
All around is the vastness of ocean, the world of his fantasies, and his beloved woman! In Argentina they will be successful, but what will they face after returning to their homeland? She was arrested as the wife of an enemy of the people... 18 years in prison, in camps, in exile. He was excluded from life, from profession – he was ignored, not published, not performed… They never met again...
Director and Choreographer: Merited Art Worker of Russia Nikolai Androsov
Conductor-Director: Merited Artist of Russia Sergei Kondrashev
Playwriter: Alla Damsker Video Scenery: ARS SACRA Workshop
Costume Designer: Ekaterina Miroshnichenko