Visit of forty musicians from Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Sixth Annual Festival, “Days of Russian Culture at Boston University”.  The schedule included a wide range of concerts, workshops, lectures, master-classes, and a conference:

Concerts
Two collaborative concerts brought large audiences to the CFA Concert Hall.  On November 1st, 2004, the Opera Institute soloists shared the bill with the singers of the Academy of Young Singers of the Mariinsky Theater.  The Moscow Conservatory New Music Ensemble concert, 50 Years After Stalin's Death:  The History of Russia in Sounds, took place two weeks later, on November 16th.  One of the soloists in this concert was BU professor Penelope Bitzas who performed in Symphony No. 4, Prayer, by Galina Ustvolskaya.

Conference
The collaboration of the young musicians this past Fall extended beyond the concert’s practice.  The Young Scholars Conference, organized and led by Marina Kornakova (St. Petersburg) and Jeremy Yudkin (Boston), took place on 10/28-10/29, 2003.  Eighteen young musicologists, nine from each country, who are finishing their work on the bilingual collection of essays, discussed Collaboration and Scholarly Exchange on the first day and the Editorial Policy on the second day of the Conference.

Master Classes
The Festival’s schedule included four master-classes: two by professor Larissa Gergieva, the Director of the Mariinsky Theater Young Singers' Academy (10/29, organized by Mark Goodrich for the voice department of the School of Music and 10/31, organized by  Sharon Daniels and Bill Lumpkin for the Opera Institute) and two by the Moscow Conservatory professor Galina Shirinskaya (11/10, String Sonata master-class organized by Sheila Kibbe for the collaborative piano department and 11/13, for the String department organized by Peter Zazofsky).

Lectures
Professor Shirinskaya, daughter of Sergey Shirinsky, a founding member of the famous Beethoven String Quartet (Russia), gave a lecture for the string quartet class (organized by Peter Zazofsky), Beethoven String Quartet:  Life of the Historical Ensemble (11/13).  Two other lectures were quite different in scope:  Professor Vladimir Tarnopolsky of the Moscow State Conservatory lectured at the Composers' Forum 11/19 on Timbre/Harmony/Structure in Tarnopolsky's "Cassandra" (organized by Richard Cornell); and Kind of Red:  Jazz in the Soviet Union, by Zinaida Kartasheva, professor of musicology from the Moscow State University of Culture and Arts (organized by Jeremy Yudkin 11/19).

The Educational Bridge Project collaborated in the Fall with a new counterpart, the Museum Program at the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS).  The State Hermitage Museum art historian Anna Konivets, who is also a Director of the Hermitage-Guggenheim Project, as well as the Educational Bridge Project’s coordinator in St. Petersburg, gave a lecture, The Russian Emperor as an Art Collector: the Masterpieces of the Peter the Great in the Hermitage Collection, on November 20th (CAS Museum Studies, organized by professor Melanie Hall.)  For this event, the Educational Bridge Project received additional funding from the Humanities Foundation at Boston University.

Workshop
Young Composers' Workshop was a new initiative taken by the Educational Bridge Project this past Fall.  The format of the Workshop included two rehearsals and a final concert of compositions written by Boston University students, Ivana Lisak, Paul Wash, Mauricio Pauly-Maduro, Mark Berger, Chao Cheng, and Ramon Castillo. The scores were mailed to Moscow four weeks prior to the Workshop for the Moscow performers and conductor Igor Dronov to start while still in Russia.  The final stage of the Workshop, the performance of the BU students’ compositions, took place on November 18th at the CFA concert hall and attracted the students and faculty of the composition department.