the uk-russia year of music, which took place between ... · year of music 2019-20 24 world voice...

The UK-Russia Year of Music, which took place between March 2019 and March 2020, built on the successes of UK-Russia Years of Culture in 2014, Language and Literature in 2016 and Science and Education in 2017.

It celebrated the UK’s and Russia’s rich musical cultures through a programme that fostered people-to-people contacts and mixed showcasing, professional development and exchange, digital partnerships and media projects and engagement with young people.

IMAGE: Robert Ames and Sound Up orchestra in Russian premieres of works by Jonny Greenwood and Mica Levi aka Micachu at Zaryadye Concert Hall

COVER: Shabaka Hutchings of The Comet Is Coming at a Selector Live party at Strelka

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Our programme for the UK-RussiaYear of Music included over 200 events, over 500 UK participants and an extraordinary range of musical genres. Our events were hosted all across Russia, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, and showcased the excellence, inclusiveness and diversity that define the UK.

The relationships and partnerships fostered during the year have already connected the UK with millions of people in Russia, and we are confident that these connections will support the relationship between our countries for generations to come, whilst bringing joy to many through the common language of music.

We are delighted to present this report, and deeply proud of our teams and all those who made the UK-Russia Year of Music a reality.

Deborah Bronnert CMGHer Majesty’s Ambassador to theRussian Federation

Michael Bird OBEDirector Russia, British Council / Cultural Counsellor, British Embassy

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IMAGES: Performance by the Sacconi Quartet and Peter Donohoe at the Ambassador’s Residence.

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We presented UK bands Benin City and Rosie Lowe in Kolomenskoye Park in Moscow at one of Russia’s biggest festivals, and Kate NV & Lafawndah and Total Refreshment Centre improvised with Russian musicians. Kommersant newspaper wrote that the UK stage had the most interesting names.

UK stage atAfisha Picnic It has been an

amazing experience for Afisha Picnic to produce a stage, not in a partnership with a commercial brand, but with an organisation that, just like us, puts content ahead of everything else and is 100% invested in the event.

Daria ShulgaDirector, Afisha Picnic

We partnered RUSH, the first non-commercial, non-state music export initiative in Russia, to present four new Russian bands – Shortparis and CHKBNS from St Petersburg and Fogh Depit and Lucidvox from Moscow – at The Great Escape in Brighton, renowned as the place to discover emerging music talent.

The Great Escape

We brought three rising stars from the UK to the Zil Cultural Centre in Moscow for the most edgy festival in Russia: post-punk band Warmduscher, experimental rock quartet Black Midi and electronic dance artist SOPHIE. Bol Festival won the Jager Music Award for the best event of 2019.

Bol Festival

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A sensational concert, unprecedented demand for tickets … and all without any fanfares or self-love. An absolutely unforgettable evening.

The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists performed in Russia for the first time since Sir John Eliot Gardiner founded them over 50 years ago, and sell-out audiences at Zaryadye Concert Hall in Moscow and the Great Hall of the St Petersburg Philharmonia had the chance to meet him afterwards when he signed copies of his book on Bach in a new Russian edition supported by a UK-Russia Year of Music publishing grant.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s debut in Russia

Ekaterina RomanovaOpera News


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The first performance in Russia of Sir George Benjamin’s new opera Lessons in Love and Violence by the London Chamber Orchestra and guest British soloists under young British conductor Oliver Zeffman at the Mariinsky Concert Hall in St Petersburg was attended by the composer, a passionate admirer of Russian culture, who also took part in a public conversation which was followed by a screening of the recent BBC documentary George Benjamin: What Do You Want to Do When You Grow Up?

Sir George Benjamin’s first visit to St Petersburg

This was one of the most exciting and moving trips of my life … to visit glorious St Petersburg and attend that remarkable performance of my opera was a dream come true and something I will never forget.

Sir George Benjamin


Two major exhibitions from the UK were accompanied by festivals exploring connections between British painting and British music.

British Year at the Pushkin Museum

We want to show that the relationship between our countries is not as bad as it seems.

Marina LoshakDirector, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

In the spring Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the School of London from Tate Britain was accompanied by three concerts, one highlight of which was Marcus Farnsworth singing Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King.

In the winter December Nights, the most prestigious classical music festival in Moscow, was linked to a major Thomas Gainsborough exhibition from over a dozen UK museums and featured British ensembles including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and I Fagiolini.

The Pushkin Museum explicitly celebrated the power of the arts to maintain friendships despite the political climate.

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Rinse FM is one of the most influential UK radio stations playing electronic dance music; Present Perfect is respected for its independence and takes place in a dramatic location on the St Petersburg waterfront; together we presented the late great DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall, Glasgow-based Auntie Flo and grime intellectual Mr Mitch.

Rinse FM at Present Perfect

It was a big pleasure to work with you and I really hope we will have more collaborative projects in the future.

Dmitri AgalakovArtist Booking Manager, Present Perfect


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Iconic Worldwide FM founder and DJ Gilles Peterson combined UK talent such as Skinny Pelembe, Emma-Jean Thackray, Elsa Hewitt and Tash LC with some of the most exciting emerging music from the Moscow underground; Russia has now leapt to fourth position for Worldwide FM listenership.

Worldwide FM at Powerhouse

NTS combines the independent spirit of a pirate radio station with new technologies; Strelka is one of Moscow’s best venues with a reputation for selecting the most interesting artists and attracting the biggest audiences; together we showcased minimalist electronic musician Beatrice Dillon and dub-techno sound artist Space Afrika.

NTS at Strelka



A group of recent National Opera Studio alumni shared the range of performance skills inculcated by one of the UK’s oldest and most respected training programmes for professional singers with students and teachers at the Moscow Conservatoire, singers and staff at Helikon Opera, and a wide range of audiences at prestigious venues including Catherine the Great’s palace at Tsaritsyno as part of a series of Ambassadors’ Evenings.

National Opera Studio

In partnership with PRS in the UK and RUSH in Russia, we invited UK musicians Kathy Hinde, Stephanie Singer and Vessel to undertake residencies in Kaliningrad, Ekaterinburg and Nizhnii Novgorod, and Russian musicians Igor Yakovenko, CHKBNS and Aeger Smoothie in Aldeburgh, Liverpool and Glasgow.

UK-Russia Musicians in Residence

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We have a rich music culture, as Russia does too, and music is a universal language.

Sir Laurie Bristow KCMG Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Russian Federation 2016-20

Inspired by the Cold War friendship between Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich and British composer Benjamin Britten, a unique bi-national ensemble bringing together young people of conservatoire age in a shared cultural experience gave five concerts in Russia and seven concerts in the UK.

Britten-Shostakovich Festival Orchestra



We partnered Parallel, which fosters the visibility of women and gender balance in the Russian music industry, to run a professional development programme for women. Saffron Records from Bristol ran a workshop for female DJs and Brighter Sound from Manchester worked on song writing with female producers.

Women in music

Such a brilliant group, we were blown away by the experience and came away feeling so inspired. It was an honour to be a small part of such an important project.

Lucy ScottBrighter Sound programme manager

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Building on earlier exchanges, we took a sixteen-strong delegation representing Russian orchestras and concert halls to the Association of British Orchestras annual conference in Manchester. They were particularly engaged by the focus on making orchestras relevant to the wider community, social inclusion and active engagement with people with disabilities.

Association of British Orchestras

The key topics in the programme will be relevant to the Russian classical music industry in the years ahead – now I feel much more prepared for the future challenges!

Evgeny StodushnyChief Executive, Krasnoyarsk Regional Philharmonia


World Voice is a programme developed by the British Council to train teachers to use singing in the classroom with musical, educational, physical, psychological and social benefits. Richard Frostick, Artistic Director, introduced it to Russia at Letovo School and the World Voice handbook was translated into Russian and made widely available.

World VoiceAfter this seminar I feel much more confident in myself. Singing together with your friends and teachers and learning things with pleasure at the same time – that’s what really makes you happy!

Letovo school student


Envision Sound is a programme for emerging film composers. In partnership with Moscow Film School we ran a workshop facilitated by Michael Price, whose music for the BBC series Sherlock is well-known to Russian audiences. Feedback from participants was that it was a professionally life changing experience.

Envision Sound Selector PRO is

a professional development programme inspired the British Council’s Selector radio show and connects music people around the world with music experts from the UK. In partnership with Moscow Music School we offered workshops in artist management, song writing, music production and music performance.

Selector PRO

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As part of our FCO-funded Future Culture programme for future cultural leaders, we brought ten leaders from the UK music sector, including Gillian Moore of Southbank Centre, Huw Stephens of BBC Music Introducing and Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records, to talk to audiences of music professionals and students in Moscow and St Petersburg

Future Culture public talks

I made some very good connections and am in touch with a number of people that I met in both St Petersburg and Moscow … Both Garage and New Holland are vibrant and exciting new venues.

Gillian MooreMusic Director, Southbank Centre


I admired the energy and experience of Gillian Moore. I understood that the UK is a much more complex country in terms of culture than I thought.

Audience member for Gillian Moore’s talk


Paraorchestra is the world’s only large-scale, professional, integrated orchestra in which brilliant musicians with disabilities are seen and heard in their rightful place alongside non-disabled musicians. Their performances at Garage in Moscow, which is at the forefront of inclusive approaches to art in Russia, were a revelation for their audiences, showing what is possible when perceptions of disabled musicians in classical performance are challenged and how different the experience of music can be when audience members have permission to move among and around the orchestra.

Paraorchestra

If it happens that the British and Russian governments find it hard to talk to each other, people can talk to each other through the universal language of music.

Charles HazlewoodConductor and Artistic Director, Paraorchestra

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Gideon Feldman, Head of Programmes at Attitude is Everything, which improves deaf and disabled people’s access to live music by working in partnership with audiences, artists and the music industry, led a workshop on making outdoor events accessible for deaf and disabled audiences and gave a public talk on Music without Barriers.

Attitude is Everything The workshop by Gideon Feldman

of Attitude is Everything was very important for Garage as an institution which has so many live events. We learned strategies and methods for facilitating accessibility during events and found a nice team of co-thinkers from other organisations.

Lyudmila LuchkovaInclusion Department, Garage

Matt Peacock, founder of Streetwise Opera which today involves 800 homeless people a year in making opera in the UK, and Director of With One Voice which involves 10,000 homeless people a year worldwide, talked to audiences in Moscow and St Petersburg about their right to participate in cultural life and

With One Voice


to enjoy the arts, and how music gives them permission to believe in themselves, changes public opinion and positively influences policy. He also made contact with the Neprikasaemiye foundation for inclusive arts and the Nochlezhka charity which supports homeless people in St Petersburg.


My career and my life have been about listening in the deepest possible sense. Losing my hearing meant learning how to listen differently, to discover features of sound I hadn’t realised existed. Losing my hearing made me a better listener.

Dame Evelyn Glennie

Through our partnership with the St Petersburg Philharmonia, we presented Evelyn Glennie, the world’s premier solo percussionist, who was drawn to percussion as her hearing declined because she could “feel the sound”. She performed with Scottish improvisation trio HLK (Richard Harrold on piano, Ant Law on guitar and Richard Kass on drums) to a sell-out audience.

Evelyn Glennie and Trio HLK

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Everything came together so well I am sure that this is the start of a long-term collaboration.

Natalya ChabovskayaDirector, Tomsk Philharmonia

The Tomsk Philharmonia opened its 2019-20 season with a concert of British music including the Elgar cello concerto with Baku-born, Russian-speaking, UK-educated Jamal Aliyev as soloist who inspired an outstanding performance by a conductor and orchestra performing the work for the first time and deeply affected the Tomsk audience.


In partnership with the Krasnoyarsk Regional Philharmonia we developed a diverse programme of collaborative projects in a number of Siberian cities in addition to the hub city of Krasnoyarsk. Nicholas McCarthy, the only one-handed pianist to graduate from the Royal College of Music, performed with the Siberian State Symphony Orchestra, as did violinist Benjamin Baker and viola player Timothy Ridout.

British Music in Siberia

The Sacconi Quartet, performing in Russia for the first time, and Peter Donohoe, known and loved by Russian audiences as a Tchaikovsky Competition prize winner, toured to Krasnoyarsk, Kemerovo, Novosibirsk and Barnaul with a programme of British and Russian music, and a final concert in Moscow, at the British Ambassador’s Residence, was an occasion to celebrate the success of the UK-Russia Year of Music.


After every concert we were struck by the young audience members who came backstage to tell us what the music had meant to them personally. That never happens at home!

Ben HancoxSacconi Quartet

Sacconi Quartet

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They were the shows of our lives and we promise to come back soon!

The furthest north our programme reached was Murmansk, the largest city in the Arctic Circle, where Robocobra Quartet from Northern Ireland played at Inversia Festival which marks the reappearance of the sun after six weeks of polar night.

Inversia Festival in Murmansk

The Assist

On the dividing line between Europe and Asia, Ekaterinburg is developing links with Birmingham which were celebrated by the appearance of Riscas, The Assist and The Twang, all young bands from Birmingham, at the fifth annual Ural Music Night.

Ural Music Night in Ekaterinburg


Northern people make their own warmth.

Chris RyanDrummer-vocalist, Robocobra Quartet

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We held an open call and awarded grants to Russian publishers to support the translation of twelve UK titles devoted to music, ranging from Sir John Eliot Gardiner on Bach to Mick Wall on Black Sabbath, from Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey to Mike Roberts’ How Art Made Pop.

Publishing grants


In partnership with the Interregional Federation of Reading we delivered a bilingual reading championship dedicated to music, with qualifying rounds in Irkutsk, Moscow, Perm, Ekaterinburg, St Petersburg, Volgograd, Arkhangelsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Kazan, and the final at the British Ambassador’s Residence in Moscow.

Loud Allowed

Again in partnership with the Interregional Federation of Reading, we delivered ten open seminars on books and music in Rostov-on- Don, Perm, Novosibirsk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Petrozavodsk, Kazan, St Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Saratov and Moscow.

Chords and Words

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Our fourth annual seminar at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate, brought together six UK authors – diverse voices from diverse heritages – whose writing is linked with music. Jay Bernard, Diana Evans, Lavinia Greenlaw, David Keenan, Fiona Maddocks and Glyn Maxwell spent three days with sixty influencers from all over Russia.

British Literature Today Your welcome, your

curiosity, the depth of your engagement with our work, your interrogation of us, everything, has been incredibly enriching and encouraging for us all.

Lavinia GreenlawChair of the seminar


One of the richest experiences I’ve had. A genuine cultural exchange.

Jay BernardWriter

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In partnership with online entertainment portal The-Village.ru, VisitBritain ran a digital campaign using playlists, travel guides created for each user and an interactive quiz, with 66 per cent of respondents agreeing with the message that the UK is a music destination.

VisitBritain also took a group of Russian bloggers to the Lovebox Festivals in London and the Edinburgh Festivals to discover and experience the diversity of the UK music scene, meet musicians and music lovers and post on Instagram and YouTube.

VisitBritain


In conjunction with our annual Study UK fairs we held an open call for seven UK music institutions to hold lectures and promotional events in Moscow, St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, attracting over 5,000 potential students and their parents, with 73 per cent of respondents saying they were likely to visit the UK for work and education.

Study UK

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We partnered with Arzamas Academy, one of Russia’s leading online learning platforms, to produce monthly podcasts and long reads about Moments in British Musical History, from choral music at the time of the first Queen Elizabeth to post-punk and grime, the impact of immigration on British music and the influence of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

From Choral to Hardcore We partnered with

Yandex Music, Russia’s number one music streaming service, to curate a series of twelve playlists spotlighting participants in the UK-Russia Year of Music programme.

Number one

For Yandex Music this partnership meant not just supplying our users with amazing content from top players in the industry, but also a chance to introduce them to those who shape the music market and demonstrate a great level of music expertise.

Diana PashkovskaiaEditor, Yandex Music

This project gave us a perfect excuse to dive into our favourite British music and a great opportunity to explore its lesser known aspects.

Anna ShurManaging Director, Arzamas


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IMAGE: Sound Up orchestra at Zaryadye Concert Hall


UK-Russia Year of Musicin numbers:

We engaged with

577UK artists and

1,720Russian artists

We worked with

96UK organisations and

346Russian organisations

We organised

235events in

34cities across Russia

1.77direct engagement

million 15.7media reach

million

30.8digital reach

million 48.3overall reach

million

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We earned

2,705media mentions

We were mentioned in

1,139online and print

publications

We arranged

63interviews with Year of

Music participants

We were mentioned in

101TV and radiobroadcasts


IMAGE: Ayanna Witter-Johnson at Esse Jazz Club during Vivacello Festival

Associates

Galina EvdokimovaNadezhda KurkinaNicole McNeillyElizaveta RozovaAnna SafronovaAnastasia VolkovaNicholas Winter

IMAGE: The Comet Is Coming at a Selector Live party at Strelka

BACK COVER: Yazz Ahmed at Usadba Jazz festival

UK-Russia Year of Music team:British Council / Cultural and Education Section, British Embassy Moscow

British Embassy Moscow

Ekaterina ArkhipovaMichael BirdOleg EletskiyEvgenia GerasimovaTatiana IlyinaLidia KhesedAysylu MutigullinaSofia OsmanElizaveta UtolinaOlga Zotova

Olga Bocharova Laurie BristowDeborah BronnertHarry DadswellMinah DadswellYana KronevaldMikhail MenshikovNatallia NenarokamavaTom OppenheimAnastasia ParfenovaIrina SarychevaLindsay Skoll Evgeniya Tvorogova

VisitBritain

Tatiana KhoreshokEkaterina Merenchuk

British Council Music Department

Anna BlinerStephen BloomfieldCatherine BurgisGeorge ClokeMichael DuffyCathy GrahamKatie MacDonaldSarah MoirTom Sweet

With thanks toUK Advisory Group

Louise Horton Foreign & Commonwealth Office

Robin JohnsonVisitBritain

Deborah Keyser Tŷ Cerdd

Anna MaloneyDepartment for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Linda Merrick Conservatoires UK, Royal Northern College of Music

Keith NicholDepartment for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Paul Pacifico Association of Independent Music

Phil Patterson Department for International Trade

Mark Pemberton Association of British Orchestras

Ciaran ScullionArts Council of Northern Ireland

Chris Tams BPI

Gill Maxwell Scottish Music Centre

Alexandra Ryder Foreign & Commonwealth Office

Report design

Einar Iliyev

British Council Wider Europe region

Claire de Braekeleer


British Consulate General Ekaterinburg

Richard DewellJudy Kpogho

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