V International Festival
Music of the Greater Hermitage

The festival entitled Music of the Greater Hermitage is unique in a number of respects, beginning with the fact that it is held in the open air, in a space delimited by the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

This amazing "concert hall" - the Grand Courtyard of the Winter Palace - was "inaugurated" in 2001 when Krzysztof Penderecki’s oratorio The Seven Gates of Jerusalem premiered here. The concert then became a symbolic gesture: the gates were thrown open and a new millennium was let in. The Hermitage, headed by its Director and Chairman of the Artistic Council of its newly created Festival, Mikhail Piotrovsky, announced that it would be a bold innovator and benevolent patron of the musical art.

The Hermitage Courtyard dictates its own conditions when serving as a concert hall: it requires shows of a certain, enormous scale, which explains the appearance of the grandiose oratory in 2001, the carnival musical show in 2003, and the mystery show in 2004, in all of which there were a great number of musicians and a huge number of spectators present for the musical feast.

The State Hermitage orchestra is the musical host of the festival, in a manner of speaking. The audience can appreciate in its sound that it is a successor to the old Petersburg traditions of chamber performances. The orchestra is noted for its artistic boldness and ability to experiment. There perform alongside it at the festival some of the best orchestras of the world: the chamber orchestra Virtuosi of Moscow, under the direction of maestro Saulius Sondeckis, and the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater, under the direction of maestro Valery Gergiev.

In 2005 the Festival marks its fifth anniversary, an age at which a person begins to show a clear personality. The Festival’s character appears to be determinedly romantic, and this is evidenced in the concept of the programs and in the choice of repertoire. In our lives over the last few years, there has been a catastrophic shortage of Romanticism, meaning purity and authenticity of feelings, depth of life experience, strength of emotions, breadth of creative fantasy, philosophical speculation about the sense of life, and faith in love and beauty.

On 29 June the most popular and beloved works of Tchaikovsky will be played in the concert entitled Tchaikovsky Gala. The unique trumpeter Sergey Nakaryakov is the special guest for the concert and will perform Variations on a Rococo Theme, which was written by Tchaikovsky for the cello.

The culmination of the Festival will be a performance of Berlioz’ Requiem on 1 July at 22.00 in the Grand Courtyard. The Orchestra and Chorus of the Mariinsky Theater will participate in this, together with the State Hermitage Orchestra under the direction of maestro Gergiev. One of the most talented and interesting young Russian singers of our day, Daniil Shtoda, will perform solo arias at this concert. Shtoda is a gifted performer with a pure voice of amazingly bright timbre as well as natural musicality. It is rare to find that such a voice has been trained and polished in so skilful and painstaking a manner, in keeping with its natural potential, rather than against it.

The organizers of the Festival are the State Hermitage, the Hermitage Music Academy and the producer’s group Domus. Relying on the traditions created by generations of outstanding performers in the arts and their contemporary representatives, they have turned the Festival into a concentration of masterpieces of the musical art. The audience witnesses each time an unprecedented performance of Music where there is a feeling of immediacy and the "here and now" amidst an atmosphere of mystery in the Hermitage at night. All of this gives birth to a musical fairy tale.