by Allan Pulker
Svetlana Dvoretskaia
If I told you this first item is about a company that in the past three months brought Toronto the Terem Quartet and Dmitri Hvorostovsky (November), the St. Petersburg State Ballet on Ice (December), and Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (January) you’d be forgiven for thinking “big time.” And you’d be wrong. Think instead Show One Productions, the very personal contribution of arts entrepreneur Svetlana Dvoretskaia to the town (and country) she now calls home. And her season isn’t over! April 26 Show One will present the fourth annual Young Stars of the Young Century concert at the Weston Recital Hall and on May 26 the Moscow Virtuosi with Van Cliburn Competition laureate, Olga Kern.
I had coffee with Dvoretskaia a few days before going to press, to talk about her burgeoning career as an impresario - a word she is helping rescue from disrepute. “After I came to Canada,” she told me, “I found work in a dress shop and after a year doing that got a corporate job. People told me how successful I was, but I didn’t feel successful, because I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do.” In 2003 a chance meeting led to an invitation to produce a concert, in Toronto, by Vladimir Spivakov and the Moscow Virtuosi. That concert was a big success not only artistically but also at the box office and really launched her company.
Now, five years later, she’s working steadily with some of the biggest stars in the business, but characteristically the project she wants to talk about is Young Stars of the Young Century, a concert in which she brings together young performers from Canada and from the former Soviet Republics. This year it takes place on April 26, once again at the George Weston Recital Hall. “I get the most joy out of this,” she told me. “It’s a very special thing, not only because it is unique and gives exposure abroad to young artists, but also at the personal level, because of the friendships that are made. It has consistently been a beautiful and positive experience for everyone involved.”
“So little attention is paid here to the arts” she observes, but the tone is diagnostic rather than judgmental. If, during their formative years, everyone could receive knowledge of music “the world would be a better, more interesting, more creative place. We need people in power and people in the media to be stronger about the importance of the arts in life. There is a preoccupation in society with negativity, destruction and violence.” She tells about being approached by a major TV company to do a ‘reality TV’ program based on the Young Artists concert. “You will have to change the concept,” I was told. “If we take the great inspirational concert you’re creating to any network, we will not be able to sell it, because people will not watch it. What we can sell is humiliation, competition, kids crying.”
The event is modelled, albeit on a much smaller scale, on the Vladimir Spivakov International Charity Foundation’s Moscow Meets Friends International Festival which brings as many as 3000 young people from all over the world to Moscow each year. To find out more about the Foundation go to http://spivakov.ru/lang_en .
The concert on April 26 will offer some extraordinarily promising young musical talent. Strengthening art in life happens one action at a time. We can vote with our feet.