Newspaper “Time of News” dated 22.06.2010.
                                 

The Fifth Festival of the world symphony orchestras has been significantly distinguished with forums of the previous years. The Russian orchestra was performing there, among member countries were figured such states as Turkey, China, South Korea, India, and a place was found in the program for two new opuses recently performed in Europe….
The Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra with the “Scheherazade” of Rimsky-Korsakov and the Fifth Symphony “Resurrection” of Alexei Rybnikov had a performance on June 9. One of the strongest orchestras concretizes with the best performances under conduction of art director Vladimir Fedoseyev, however the maestro was busy with a training of Dvorak’s “Rusalka” in Zurich. Alexander Sladkovsky was standing at the conductor’s stand, diligent and skilful, and Rybnikov’s music too was close to him: in March Sladkovsky carried out brilliantly his Concerto for viola cello with the orchestra. To say the truth, the “Scheherazade” was already performed at the forum and Rybnikov was not the most suitable candidate for representation of the Russian symphonic music.
If one takes for a criterion the audience’s reaction, the performance was a great success: the audience stood up already after the second minute of ovations, every now and then around Rybnikov was named the genius. Such thing did not even happen on the eve – at the performance of the Seoul philharmonic orchestra, one of the best of the season. However, the composition satisfied not everyone – a majority of questions was caused by a genre definition that the author commented as follows: “The composition is, no doubt, near to an oratorio but all canons of a symphonic form have been fully observed”.  
The ТSO was integrated in the Asian theme of the festival performance not only owing to the “Scheherazade”: there is something eastern there reminding of the Great Wall or the 14-meter statute of the leader made of gold.
Ilya Ovchinnikov