Rossini’s Guillaume Tell will receive its first performances at Mariinsky II on 16 October at 19:00 and 17 October at 12:00 and 19:00, marking the theatre’s first premiere of the season. For the first time in Russia the opera will be staged in its original language. The ambitious new production brings together the renowned Italian stage director Giancarlo del Monaco, set designer Antonio Romero and costume designer Gabriela Salaverri, with Valery Gergiev as the music director

The XIV International Organ Festival Mariinsky will take place at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre from 20 October to 4 November. Each year the festival brings together renowned organists from different countries to perform outstanding works seldom heard in concert. This year’s programme will showcase leading artists from France, Spain and Russia

October at the Mariinsky Theatre promises a wealth of outstanding concerts featuring acclaimed ensembles and some of today’s finest musicians. With its exceptional acoustics the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre offers audiences the opportunity to experience masterpieces of the world’s musical heritage at their best

On 6 and 8 October the Moscow State Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre will visit Mariinsky II with the St Petersburg premiere of its production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. People’s Artist of Russia Hibla Gerzmava will sing the title role on both evenings

The final leg of the large-scale Genius of Place festival of musical tributes opens in St Petersburg on 24 September, in the city where Dmitri Shostakovich was born. Celebrations marking the 120^th anniversary of the composer’s birth will provide a fitting finale to the festival’s third season, which has brought Valery Gergiev and leading performers and ensembles from across Russia to places associated with the country’s great composers to play their music