In Avignon, the world’s main theatre festival, shows are performed outdoors at dusk - right in the yards of houses, schools and former monasteries. Thanks to the efforts of Electrotheatre artistic director Boris Yukhananov, a piece of Avignon has appeared in Moscow. Built by the Wowhous Bureau, the Stanislavsky’s newest stage (an amphitheatre for 150 spectators, plus a gallery for standing spectators) not only copies the typology inscribed in the urban landscape of seasonal sites that are characteristic of legendary Avignon, but recreates its atmosphere where a democratic approach is organically connected to uncompromising artistic experiment. Thus was “Galileo," a joint initiative of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and the Polytechnic Museum, presented at the opening of the Theatre Yard – a project at the intersection of scientific pop, new academic music and experimental theatre.

The authors of "Galileo" do not prevaricate by calling it an "opera for violin and scientist." The minimalist production composed by a quintet of Russian composers and staged by Boris Yukhananov, has only two protagonists - Grigory Amosov and Yelena Revich. While the famous violinist, along with the red-robed soloists of the Questa Musica ensemble under the direction of Philipp Chizhevskiy, resembling a hero from "Young Pope," perform five new scores inspired by the fate of Galileo, the famous mathematician Amosov is reincarnated as his older colleague. His narrated text is heard hovering just over the soundscape, as if enclosing it in delicate quotation marks. The five-part form of “Galileo” is emphatically, stylistically heterogeneous: Pavel Karmanov offers a friendly minimalism, Kirill Chernegin provides a theatricality on the verge of action art, while Kuzma Bodrov displays virtuoso instrumental composition. The undoubted leaders are Dmitri Kourliandski with his mechanistic music that balances on the brink of physiological blues, and Sergej Newski with a novella that is woven together from gaps and incompleteness. The ragged sound material ultimately reveals a new harmony of the spheres.

What does “opera” have to do with all this? The interface of the performance, indeed, is far from traditional notions about the genre. There are no arias or choirs. Moreover, no one - horrors! - even thinks of singing. But in the unifying art of “Galileo,” musical theatre seeks to re-invent itself - reflecting on its nature and breaking with age-old artistic conventions.

The drama here literally is born of the spirit of the music. "Galileo" refreshes the theatrical potential of another venerable genre - the instrumental concert, which in European culture is seen as having a very specific super-plot: "I" and "they," the challenge of personal freedom, the conflict of the individualist with the reality surrounding him. The music says much more about the fate and ideas of Galileo than the literary text which is stylized as memoires. Most of all, the audience is able to fill in the abstract, non-verbal narrative with its own meaning, independently correlating historical collisions with the musical narrative. This new production stands at the forefront of modern theatre, and is a form that is open to interpretation, a device that Thomas Mann described in "Doctor Faustus." “Galileo” is a breakthrough emerging from the intellectual cold into the risky world of new feelings.