TOKYO, Nov 10 — World figure skating champions Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov will perform to a hippie-era message of peace when they try to regain the Olympic pairs title for Russia.

They have chosen the music from the classic 1971 rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” for their free skate this season, which will culminate with the Winter Olympics in Russia’s Sochi next February.

“With this programme, we just try to (tell) all the people to live in peace,” Trankov, 30, said in English after winning the NHK Trophy in Tokyo today.

Volosozhar and Trankov scored 154.46 points in the free skate at the season’s fourth Grand Prix, close to their personal and world record of 154.66 which they set while winning the season-opening Skate America Grand Prix.

In Tokyo they won with a combined total of 236.49 points and were followed by two Chinese pairs.

“It’s like hippie music, a hippie rock opera. And we are trying to (tell) everybody you have to live in peace because now it’s like a very bad situation around the world,” Trankov said, citing violence in Africa and Syria.

“So we just want to turn back to the 80s and 70s when the people were singing, ‘Live in peace,’” said Trankov, a St Petersburg resident who was born in 1983 near the Ural mountains.

“The Olympic Games is the best place for this because the Olympics was made specially for peace. It’s very good to show our peaceful energy for all the world in the Olympic Games.”

Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov of Russia pose with the gold medals and their trophies during the award ceremony of the pairs free skating programme at the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating in Tokyo November 9, 2013.

Russia, or its predecessor the Soviet Union and a unified team of former Soviet republics, monopolised the Olympic pairs gold from the 1964 Innsbruck Games until 2010, when Yuko Kavaguti and Alexander Smirnov finished fourth.

Trankov and Volosozhar teamed up months after the Vancouver Games after competing with other partners.

They dethroned Germany’s Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy as European champions in 2012 and as world champions this year, establishing themselves as gold medal hopefuls in Sochi.

Before the start of the season, choreographer Alla Kapranova told them they needed no more difficult elements like a quadruple throw or a triple-triple jump in their long programme because they already had excellent skating skills.

“If you skate with emotion from your heart, people can feel it,” Trankov quoted the choreographer as saying.

The rock opera with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber portrays the last week of Jesus’s life. It has been performed in various musical and film adaptations around the world.

Trankov said he had watched two cinema versions, three musical productions and “read a lot of literature about this story and about this music”.

“We’re trying to skate from our heart and maybe the people just feel it,” he said. “They can feel how we love this music, how we love to skate with this music.” — AFP