The 2024-2025 production of "The Engagement at the Convent" at the Theater an der Wien featured the musical direction of Dmitry Matvienko, a young Russian conductor considered one to watch. His conducting was praised for being energetic, clear, and attentive to the details of Prokofiev's complex score, revealing the influences and depth of the work.
Trained by all the great Russian conductors, from Rozhdestvensky to Jurowski and Vasily Petrenko, he is now beginning to conduct orchestras and operas in Western Europe. He is surely one of the conductors to follow today: immediately we hear a style, an energy and at the same time a continuous attention to each note, each word, each element of musical accompaniment, never do we hear in this score, however very disheveled and diversified, something unnecessarily noisy, unnecessarily spectacular, capable of impressing the gallery. On the contrary, we feel the concern to bring back styles, allusions, quotations from Mozart or others; there is in this direction a concern for clarity that stuns so much one could serve up a noisy magma. Matvienko makes us feel here not a "cubist", "constructivist" Prokofiev or one in contradiction with the current socialist realism, he does not make us hear behind this Prokofiev the rival Stravinsky, no; I heard behind a whole culture of opera, a whole approach that only comedy, which is so difficult to achieve in music, can offer."
Wanderersite.com Guy Cherqui