The ballet "Gamma"

On 4 December 2018, the Hermitage Theatre was the venue for an evening of ballets by the Israeli ballet-master Roy Assaf. In 2017, on the initiative of the Oleg Karavaichuk Foundation, the young choreographer from Tel Aviv created a unique ballet, the first to be staged to the music of the St Petersburg genius Oleg Karavaichuk.

The premiere of Gamma, performed by soloists from the Mikhailovsky Theatre – Andrei Kasyanenko, Sergei Strelkov and Marat Shemiunov, opened the programme for the evening and brought the year that saw the 90th anniversary of the composer’s birth to a close.

The second half saw the Russian premiere of Roy Assaf’s celebrated duet Six Years Later performed by leading dancers of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, Honoured Artist Irina Perren and Marat Shemiunov.

The musical composition is based on the famous tune of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which the ballet-master devotes to the dance by two performers. They pray, argue, make up and love each other to a musical accompaniment of the 1960s pop group Marmalade and a divine 18th-century oratorio by Handel.