The Music of the Great Hermitage international
cultural project

In July 2002 the rooms of the Hermitage played host to the Music of the Great Hermitage international cultural project, the successor to the 2001 TUBA MIRUM project. The new project was a component of the wide-reaching long-term programme for the reconstruction and development of the museum entitled The Great Hermitage.

The festival marking the inauguration of the project included three concerts. The programme for the first concert, which was held in the St George Hall (Large Throne Room) of the Winter Palace featured Beethoven's Consecration of the House overture and C major Mass performed by the State Hermitage Orchestra, the Bad Homburg Bach Choir and soloists from Germany with Saulius Sondeckis conducting.

The second concert was held in the Great Church of the Winter Palace. The Millennium chamber choir under the direction of Lev Dunayev presented religious choral music by the composers Bortniansky and Galuppi and Bach motets. The concert was conceived as a set of musical illustrations for the 15th-century stained- glass panels from the Marienkirche in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany that had been restored in the Hermitage and were on display in the church.

The concluding concert, held again in the St George Hall, was conducted by Mats Liljefors (Sweden). It featured Haydn's Creation, the oratorio that 200 years before, in 1802, had been performed at the opening of the St Petersburg Philharmonic Society, a body created under the patronage of Alexander I that went on to play an immense role in the development of musical life in Russia.