Concert Hall

Film screening

Director: Friedrich Ermler 
Music by Vladimir Deshevov

The Mariinsky Orchestra

Three films that appeared on the screen in 1929 – Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's The New Babylon, Yevgeny Chervyakov's The Golden Beak and Fridrikh Ermler's Fragment of an Empire formed the culmination and conclusion of the "golden age" of Soviet silent film. For each of these films an original music score was composed, to be accompanied by a "live" orchestral performance. The music for Fragment of an Empire was created by Vladimir Deshevov – the composer of the first Soviet ballets and the opera Ice and Steel. In the 1930s, however, almost the entire legacy of the avant-garde was written out of the history of the Soviet cinematographer and for a long time was forgotten, together with the music – at later revivals of Fragment of an Empire it was not performed. At the Mariinsky Theatre, for the first time since 1929 the film will be accompanied by Deshovov's original music, the score of which (using the set of orchestral parts retained in the theatre's library) was restored by composer Matvei Sobolev.