Coinciding with the month-long Beijing Music Festival which gives culture vultures an amazing musical feast spread throughout the capital, the Symphony Orchestra of Russia will offer a delicious dish with a distinctive Russian flavour.

On October 5, the orchestra will perform at the Memory Hall of Peking University. The following day, the China Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Russian conductor Pavel Kogan and the British pianist Barry Douglas, will play at the Forbidden City Concert Hall. One of the most anticipated musical events is the debut performance of the Symphony Orchestra of Russia at the Century Theatre under the baton of female conductor Maria Eklund.

The group was created in 1991 by the Maestro Veronika B. Dudarova and is made up of the cream of Russia's musicians from Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Minsk and Novosibirsk. The orchestra includes 12 laureates of international competitions. The brass and drum sections are magnificent. The string section consists of skilled veterans and talented young people.

In the Orchestra repertoire the creations of Beethoven, Berlioz, Bach, Bizet, Brahms, Debussy, Dvorak, Glinka, Grieg, Kolinnikov, Liszt, Liadov, Mahler, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Prokofieff, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rossini, Scriabin, Shostakovich, J. Strauss, R. Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Vivaldi, Wagner are included.

For the China tour, the orchestra will play the overture of Johnann Strauss's opera "Die Fledermasu," Grieg's "Piano Concerto in A minor" at the first half. The second half will include pieces by the Russian composers Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Khachaturian and Tchaikovsky, Austrian composer Franz von Suppe, and some Chinese pieces in encore.

Maria Eklund is no stranger to Chinese audience. Last year, she took the baton of China National Opera House to give an operatic concert. Eklund is presently main guest conductor at the Symphony Orchestra of Russia.

She is also regularly working with most of the leading orchestras in Russia, such as Academic Symphony Orchestra of Moscow, Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, Russian Philharmonic Orchestra and Russian Academic Symphony Cappella as well as Swedish and German orchestras, conducts performances of Beijing Opera theatre and Boljshoi Theatre.

The two concerts will also feature the Ukrainian pianist Ivetta Irkha. She started playing piano when she was 12 years old and graduated from the Royal Music School at Stockholm. She has won a number of competitions in Ukraine, Sweden and Denmark and tours around the world with orchestras in the United States and Europe.

(China Daily September 27, 2006)