On 9 July 2007, the Hermitage Theatre welcomed journalists to a presentation on the forthcoming 7th International Festival of Music of the Great Hermitage that will take place on 11 and 13 July 2007.

The7th International Festival of Music of the Great Hermitage has been organized by the Hermitage museum and the Hermitage Academy of Music with the support of the Committee on Culture of the Government of St Petersburg.

The Festival opened with the premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki's oratorio entitled The Seven Gates of Jerusalem on 26 July 2001 in the Great Court of the Winter Palace. A specially erected stage and improvised seating arrangement accommodated more than 350 musicians who came from six countries around the world, as well an audience that numbered more than four thousand.

In the summer of 2002, the Festival took place in the halls of the Hermitage. For the first time ever, the Grand Throne Room (St George's Hall), the main state room of the Winter Palace, was used for evening concerts, the first of which was called Vivat, Hermitage!

In 2003, the sounds of Italian music filled the courtyard and the audience witnessed a stylized presentation called the Carnival in the Northern Venice. Two world class opera performers, Lubov Kazarnovskaya and Katya Ricciarelli took part.

In 2004, the Festival combined 18th century opera - Armida e Rinaldo by Giuseppe Sarti and a Romantic musical work from the 19th century - Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique - in a music and theatrical show called Episode in the Life of an Artist, with a text by Nikolai Gogol, as performed by the Russian actor Sergei Makovetsky. There was also a musical mystery entitled Tree of Life set to the music of composers and the verse of poets from the 20th century and read by the artist, poet and musician Yurii Shevchuk and actress of stage and screen Dina Korzun.

At the anniversary 5th International Festival in 2005, the Tchaikowsky Gala program featured not only the Orchestra of the State Hermitage under the direction of Saulius Sondeckis, but also the Virtuosi of Moscow chamber orchestra and trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov. The Berlioz Requiem was performed by the symphony orchestra and chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre under the direction of Maestro Valery Gergiev.

In 2006, the Festival had three concerts. The first presented a joint program by the Virtuosi of Moscow and the Terem Quartet. - Masquerade Ball. To mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, there was a musical mystery entitled Amadeus especially created for the Festival in which the actor Sergei Bezrukov and conductor Saulius Sondeckis too part. The festival ended with the Hermitage's first ever rock concert by Yurii Shevchuk and the group DDT, together with the Orchestra of the State Hermitage, in a program entitled Acoustics of the Baroque.

The events of the 7th International Festival of Music of the Great Hermitage:
On 11 July masterpieces of classical music will be performed in the courtyard of the New Hermitage by the Orchestrino Armonia ensemble together with Mariinsky Theatre soloist Vasily Gerello.

On 13 July there will be a jazz concert in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace at which original compositions by Andrei Kondakov will performed as well as well known melodies of Antonio Carlos Jobim.

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