"Classics on the Palace" saw 200 thousand spectators

The culmination of the festive program on May 27 in honor of the City Day - the Foundation Day of St. Petersburg was the unique show "Classics on the Palace". The headliner of the concert is the brightest star of the world opera scene Anna Netrebko. Her performance was an unprecedented event, as it was her first public concert in St. Petersburg. The Classic on the Palace show beat forecasts for attendance and last year’s own record almost 10 times - a concert in the main square of the Northern capital was seen by 200,000 residents and guests of the city.

The audience heard popular arias and duets from operas and operettas by Rossini, Bizet, Kalman, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss performed by world and Russian stars of the opera scene. Together with Anna Netrebko, Ildar Abdrazakov, Olga Peretyatko, Yusif Eyvazov, Agunda Kulaeva, Vasily Ladyuk, Georgy Vasilyev, Oksana Shilova and others took the stage. All works were accompanied by the Mikhailovsky Theater Symphony Orchestra conducted by maestro Mikhail Tatarnikov.

Each number became a mini-performance in which, in addition to opera soloists and an orchestra, ballet dancers took part. Dinu Tamazlakaru and Yana Salenko, dancers of the Berlin State Ballet, performed the “Venice Carnival” from the ballet “Satanilla”, and the Mariinsky Theater soloists Maxim Zyuzin and Ekaterina Osmolkina performed the “Vienna Waltz” by Strauss. Each program was adorned with dance sketches of the corps de ballet - ballet dancers Konstantin Tachkin and the St. Petersburg State Academic Ballet Theater named after Leonid Jacobson.

The stage design of the show created the atmosphere of a real palace ball: luxurious elegant costumes of artists, snow-white, light, as if nonexistent colonnade, wide staircase framed by wrought-iron gilded lattice and decorated with lush candelabra, baroque facades seemed to come to life in the shimmering light of a huge chandelier created from 2,500 crystal pendants.

The final chord of the concert program was the unofficial anthem of St. Petersburg, “The City over the Free Neva,” performed by Vasily Ladyuk and all the participants in the concert.