Mozart and Salieri I BDT Theatre Tour

The Open Arts Festival «Cherry Forest», together with the concert agency «Moscow Region Evenings», presented the Moscow tour of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre named after G.A. Tovstonogov (St. Petersburg). The performances took place at the Moscow Art Theatre named after A.P. Chekhov from April 12 to 14, 2026.

On April 14, the BDT tour concluded with the performance «Mozart and Salieri», created based on the works of A.S. Pushkin and realized as part of the experimental project «Essays in Dramatic Studies». Following Pushkin's precepts, the creators of the performance surrender to free art and disregard base utility, using the tools of performance for this purpose.

Two actors and one musician (Pavel Yurinov, Andrei Feskov, Vladimir Rozanov) improvise, rearrange the staging, swap roles, and reproduce Pushkin's text anew. Each time it may sound different — everything depends on the improvisational potential of the performers. In these repetitions, the true story of the contradictory relationships between different acting temperaments, musical structures, rhythms, and rhymes is born.

The performance has no fixed duration. It can be stopped by the performers at any moment or go on «until the last spectator remains». It can be «as clear as a simple scale» or as tangled as complex algebra. It can travel the path from a cabaret, when «a worthless painter defiles Raphael's Madonna», to a piercing ringing purity, disturbing «in us, children of dust, the wingless desire to fly away».

Alexandra Tolstosheva, stage director: «I am interested in play theatre, this conventional formulation really explains a lot. I don't like concepts, I like it when they simply play, feel theatre as a game. And in this type of theatre, it doesn't matter what relationships we are exploring: human, existential — the main thing is to play it out. I am happy that at the BDT I managed to work with unique artists: Andrei Feskov (Mozart), Pavel Yurinov (Salieri), and the incredible musician Volodya Rozanov. These people, besides being wonderful artists, know how to listen, to hear, possess a great sense of self-irony towards theatre, life, themselves, and I would rather tell about them than about myself or Pushkin».