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The main parts will be performed by the Bolshoi’s opera and guest soloists.
The title role will be performed by Alexei Dolgov, a prominent singer demanded at the leading Opera houses (Metropolitan Opera, Washington National Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper/Munich and others). Nadezhda Pavlova, a winner of The Golden Mask National Theatre Award for her performance of Violetta in La Traviata by G. Verdi, staged by Robert Wilson at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theater, will appear as Cunegonde. Larisa Diadkova, the leading soloist with the Mariinsky Theatre, will sing Old Lady’s part. Alexander Miminoshvili will expand his considerable repertoire at the Bolshoi, performing the role of Maximilian. Pyotr Markin, a winner of The Golden Mask National Theatre Award for his brilliant performance of a mad barber in musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (The Moscow Theatre on Taganka, directed by Alexei Frandetti), will make his debut as Pangloss.

The anniversary of Leonard Bernstein, the legendary American conductor, composer and revolutionary musician is celebrated around the world on a grand scale: the celebration covers two years – from August 25, 2017 to August 25, 2019 – and involves more than three thousand events which will undergo on six continents!

Bernstein’s musical comedy (1956) is a brilliant stage version of Voltaire’s novella of the same name (Candide: or, The Optimist). Anonymously published in 1759, it was the most caustic and comic satire of the social ills of its day. So, the book was widely banned to the public. But even after two hundred (or two hundred fifty) years, Candide’s reflections remain as pertinent now as ever.

The adventures of Candide, the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronck’s illegitimate nephew, begin after he got kicked out of the castle – the best of all possible – for his fond feelings for the Baron’s daughter Cunegonde. A flow of misfortunes and disasters befalls our innocent hero (the name Candide literally means “innocent”, “pure”), his ideas of “the best of all possible worlds” are being severely tested. In the New World he is taken prisoner by bizarre inhabitants, and then he comes upon the Paraguayan encampment of Jesuits, and finally emerges in the mythical country Eldorado, where he becomes fantastically rich, but loses almost all his fortune on the way back to Venice. At the end, sophisticated Candide and Cunegonde reconcile themselves with the fate and proclaim the new idea (“Make Our Garden Grow”): “We’re neither pure nor wise nor good, we’ll do the best we know. We'll build our house, and chop our wood, and make our garden grow”.




Bernstein, echoing Voltaire, gives this comic performance very beautiful music, toying with a variety of genres. His Candide is at the same time an opera, an operetta and a Broadway musical show. The composer himself said, “Let others decide how they would like to call it. It might seem that this is some kind of a new form. Our theater seems to have no analogues to it, so the time will tell.”