A Soviet-era Greek-myth cycle returns to a new Moscow hall: Yuri Favorin performs Sidelnikov's 'Labyrinths'

On 4 July 2026, the classicalmusicnews Telegram channel announced that the Russian pianist Yuri Favorin will perform Vyacheslav Sidelnikov's "Labyrinths" — billed as a "novel-symphony in five frescoes" — in a newly opened Moscow venue. The piece, scored for piano and reportedly built around the Greek myths of Theseus, sits at an unusual intersection of late-Soviet ambition and contemporary revival: a work of grandiose scope that spent decades more discussed than played, now being staged by one of Russia's more intellectually restless pianists in a space that, as of this week, did not yet have a settled reputation in the capital's concert calendar.

That a composer once treated as an awkward outlier of the Soviet school is being revived in a fresh hall tells a small but specific story about how Russian classical culture is metabolising its own past — and which corners of that past it is choosing to retrieve.

A score that outgrew its moment

Sidelnikov, who died in 1991 at the age of 56, belonged to a generation of Soviet composers who came of age in the post-Shostakovich thaw and struggled to find a settled place in the establishment. His writing tended toward the monumental, the mythopoeic and the explicitly literary — qualities that sat uneasily with a Soviet musical bureaucracy that, by the 1960s and 1970s, was increasingly drawn to more austere, technically self-contained idioms. "Labyrinths" sits squarely in that monumental vein: a piano cycle organised as five "frescoes," each treating a different facet of the Theseus cycle from Greek myth, with the labyrinth itself functioning as both subject and structural metaphor.

The result is the kind of score that program annotators tend to describe with adjectives — "grandiose," "sprawling," "visionary" — that simultaneously advertise and warn. For decades, the practical effect was that "Labyrinths" appeared in reference books and dissertations far more often than it appeared on concert stages. A revival by a pianist of Favorin's standing, in a venue being introduced to the public for the first time, is therefore less a routine local recital than an act of reclamation.

Favorin as interpreter

Favorin is not a household name outside Russian pianism, but he has built a reputation for exactly this kind of project: large-scale Russian and Soviet repertoire performed with evident intellectual curiosity about the score's structure rather than deference to its received reputation. His recorded catalogue leans heavily toward twentieth-century Russian and Soviet works that sit awkwardly between modernism and late-Romantic excess — the territory where Sidelnikov composed. That positioning matters, because it determines how a listener is likely to encounter "Labyrinths." This is not a recital built around the familiarity of the material; it is built around a specific claim that the material deserves the listener's full attention.

The announcement does not specify the venue's name, capacity or operator, beyond describing it as "a completely new art space in Moscow." That omission is itself worth registering. Moscow's new concert and exhibition venues have proliferated over the past several years, often tied to private philanthropy, district redevelopment, or hybrid gallery-and-performance programming. The classicalmusicnews item treats the space as a setting rather than a subject; the hall's identity will presumably become public through the concert's own ticketing.

What "revival" actually means here

Revival is a word that gets used loosely in classical-music coverage. In this case, the term fits more literally than usual: a composer whose work largely passed out of active circulation during the 1990s and 2000s, a cycle rarely if ever performed complete, and a venue that, by definition, has no prior programming history. The performance is, in effect, an opening — both of a space and of a renewed relationship between performers and a difficult score.

There is also a quieter subtext. Russian classical culture in the current decade has been engaged in an active, sometimes contested reckoning with its Soviet inheritance. Some of that reckoning privileges the officially approved canon; some of it reaches for composers and works that were sidelined, censored or simply forgotten. Sidelnikov's case is neither straightforward martyrdom nor comfortable establishment. He was published, recorded to a limited degree, and acknowledged — but his grander ambitions were regarded with suspicion by some contemporaries. A performance of "Labyrinths" in a new hall, in 2026, is a small data point in that larger negotiation: a vote, however modest, for the works that did not fit the consensus of their own time.

The stakes, and what remains unclear

For audiences in Moscow, the practical question is whether the performance opens a sustained engagement with the score or remains a one-off. A single concert in a new venue can be a beginning; it can also be a ceremonial gesture. The announcement gives no indication of whether "Labyrinths" will be recorded, toured or repeated.

What this publication can confirm is limited: Favorin will perform Sidelnikov's "Labyrinths" in Moscow on the basis of the 4 July 2026 classicalmusicnews notice, which describes the piece as a five-fresco novel-symphony on the Theseus myth and identifies the venue only as a new Moscow art space. The hall's name, ticket arrangements, and any broadcast or recording plans were not specified in the source item. Readers seeking the concrete details of date, time and address will need to watch for the venue's own programming announcement.

Small as the event is in absolute scale, it is the kind of programming decision that quietly shapes a city's musical self-image. Which scores a capital chooses to revive, and in which spaces, signals which parts of its own history it intends to keep arguing with.

Desk note: this piece was built from a single Telegram-channel notice and deliberately stops where that notice stops. Where the wire would reach for adjectives about the music, Monexus has stayed with what the announcement actually claims — a performance, a composer, a venue being introduced into the record for the first time.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/classicalmusicnews