Things to do in St. Petersburg
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Music and Concerts
You won’t have a tedious time in Saint-Petersburg, you can find entertainments cater for all tastes: theatres, concert halls, modern entertainment centers, restaurants, night clubs, sport clubs — everything that you can imagine.
St. Petersburg’s status as a cultural capital is entirely justified. It’s not just the result of its imperial past or the incredible historic center of the city (included in UNESCO’s world heritage list in its entirety), or the fact that is has preserved so many treasures from days gone by. St. Petersburg's theaters and concert halls are justly proud of their famed histories, but this cultural life continues to develop. St. Petersburg continues to host major premieres, with the finest performers in the country and the world gracing its stages. Every year, dozens of major international festivals take place in the city. Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that as far as the arts are concerned, this is a fairly conservative city.
The official theatrical Petersburg keeps to classical traditions, holding back new-fangled trends from new drama to traveling shows featuring a galaxy of stars. Nevertheless, the local theater-going public, with its legendary sensitivity, repeatedly demonstrates its passion for the idols of the avant garde: Anton Adasinsky and his Derevo theater, the AXE RussianEngineering Theater, Vadim Fisson’s Comic Trust and the Formal Theater of Andrei Moguchy.
Musical Petersburg, in general, is even more conservative: “La Traviata” and “Eugene Onegin” can often be heard in three theaters at the same time, while Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and Chopin’s piano pieces are the foundation stones of the repertoires at four concert halls. Nevertheless, at the Mariinsky Theater, the artistic director Valery Gergiev has made an historic breakthrough in recent years, having taken on all (with one exception) of Wagner’s operas, while putting on the operas and ballets of Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Thanks to the festivals, the city’s philharmonic halls, palaces and mansions frequently feature old and contemporary music and the unjustly neglected works of the Romantic era.
The culmination of the season is Gergiev’s “Stars of the White Nights” festival. Competing with this event is the Arts Square festival, run by the artistic director of the Philharmonic, Yuri Temirkanov. The beginning of the season is also packed with events, thanks to the Early Music festival. It is at these three festivals, for the most part, that touring stars appear.
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