Concert-performance "Interview with Vertinsky" in Stuttgart 23 February 2025

Text of the play, vocals - Dmitry Makarov
Musical design, arrangement of songs, looper, synthesizers, guitar, percussion - Mikhail Glebov

About the play:

Alexander Vertinsky is one of our main cultural heroes.

Born in Kiev, who became a star in Moscow of the Silver Age, who traveled around the world and died in Leningrad, the author of fashionable songs, a performer with an inimitable timbre, turned out to be a singer of tragic changes in our history. He had long been a "cocaine Pierrot" in a white mask, a regular in fashionable salons. Then the old world collapsed and Vertinsky was a nurse in the sanitation train, where he made thousands of bandages. He witnessed the collapse of the country and himself with the White Army was literally squeezed into the Crimea, and then - in exile. For a quarter of a century, the artist ate bitter emigrant bread, speaking, when there was a fashion for Russians, in front of the secular public in Parisian cafes, and more often - for their own, increasingly poor, lost their homeland and the meaning of life compatriots. And here, of course, there were unforgettable novels, vivid meetings - with Marlene Dietrich, with Charlie Chaplin and many others.

In 1943, from the Russian neighborhood of Shanghai Vertinsky with his wife and daughter after, as it was announced, "twenty-five years of touring" moved to the USSR. Legend has it that Stalin, in his own style, threw in: "Let her finish." Here went a strange and difficult life: more than 3000 concerts in all cities of the Union, several roles in the movie and ... not a single performance on the radio, not a single review in the newspapers. Think about this fact: none of the thousands of performances Vertinsky was not recorded on film.

Surprisingly, but a century after his first triumphs, 65 years after his death Vertinsky is still with us. He is loved, he is imitated, they argue about him. And now, when a new disaster has happened, when the war, reminiscent of the Civil War, has brought so much grief, divided peoples and families, pushed many thinking people into exile, it is all the more the right time to talk about Vertinsky.

Dmitry Makarov's concert-performance based on his own play "Interview with Vertinsky" (2019) is an attempt to separate the myth from the truth, to hear and see behind the echoes and understatements of a real person, and in his fate - the fate of our culture. We are waiting for ten stories from Vertinsky's life and fifteen songs performed by Dmitry accompanied by the orchestra man Mikhail Glebov.