Three days – and three completely different musical spaces. The 15th anniversary of the Astana Keshteri International Arts Festival, held in Astana from October 9th to 11th, brought together pop classical music, opera, and baroque music, demonstrating how freely different eras and genres can coexist today.
The festival, organized by the DEGDAR Humanitarian Foundation in collaboration with the Astana Opera, opened with the "Tribute to Whitney Houston" concert at the Kazakhstan Central Concert Hall. The evening's highlight was South African singer Belinda Davids, renowned for her performances of Whitney Houston's repertoire.
Legendary ballads and dance hits were accompanied by the Astana Opera Orchestra. Conducting was Italian maestro Roberto Molinelli, who has collaborated with José Carreras and Andrea Bocelli, as well as with the Sanremo Festival Orchestra. The evening's special guest was Italian rock singer Simone Romanato.
The following day, the festival's tone completely changed.
The Astana Opera stage was transformed into a grand operatic experiment, presenting the show Non-Stop OPERA. Instead of a single, complete production, audiences were treated to a musical journey through the works of Rossini, Verdi, Offenbach, Bernstein, and other composers.
Arias from Il viaggio a Reims, Falstaff, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, and Candide were combined into a single stage performance. European vocal and stage coach Alla Simoni and Italian conductor Ettore Papadia collaborated on the project. Soloists from the Astana, Almaty, and Tashkent opera houses – Bibigul Zhanuzak, Feruza Yusupova, Medet Chotabayev, Rasul Zharmagambetov, Damir Saduakhassov, and other performers – shared the stage.
Crucially, Non-Stop OPERA was not conceived as a one-off festival production: after the premiere, the project was planned to be included in the Astana Opera's permanent repertoire.
The final evening took the audience back several centuries to the music of Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Cimarosa, and Marcello.
In the Barocco program, the theater orchestra performed under conductor Evgeny Bushkov. Joining them were French oboist and professor at the Paris Conservatory Jérôme Guichard, principal flute of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of Kazakhstan Yerzhan Kushanov, and the State Trio of the Republic of Kazakhstan FORTE TRIO – Maksat Dzhusupov, Murat Narbekov, and Timur Urmancheyev. Thus, the anniversary festival was built not around a single musical genre, but around the very principle of dialogue.
Whitney Houston and a symphony orchestra. Italian conductors and soloists from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Opera and baroque. European classical music and contemporary concert culture.
"Astana Keshteri" has been working at precisely this intersection for many years, and the anniversary season particularly vividly demonstrated its core principle: music from different eras need not exist separately from one another.
Sometimes, one stage is enough to spark a conversation between them.