Oleg Lysenko and Harry-Imre Dijkstra presents: The Blizzard by Alexadr Poesjkin. It is 1812, Napoleon is about to invade Russia. Unaware of the impending danger, Masha, a sweet girl of seventeen, and Vladimir, a young ensign on leave, are desperately in love. Marriage is out of the question, because she is rich and he is poor. They decide to marry in secret and run away together. A snowstorm disrupts their plans…

In a duo performance of one hour, Oleg Lysenko and Harry-Imre Dijkstra will present Pushkin’s magnificent short story ‘The Blizzard’. Clarinetist and narrator Harry-Imre Dijkstra (Amsterdam and St. Petersburg Conservatories) has won several prizes at international chamber music competitions and specialized as a chamber musician, with a preference for lesser-known repertoire and music from Central and Eastern Europe. Oleg Lysenko is a virtuoso accordionist (Kyïv and Rotterdam conservatories) and has a preference for cross-disciplinary projects in which literature and music complement and flow into each other; for the literary concert ‘The Snowstorm’, Oleg made an adaptation of the ‘musical illustrations’ for orchestra that Georgi Sviridov (1915-1998) wrote for Pushkin’s story.