The Opera Company tours to Norway

This year the  Northern Lights international music festival celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. In line with tradition, it takes place each year in late January and early February in the Norwegian city of Tromsø, where artists and musicians working in hugely differing fields and from all over the world come together.

The Mariinsky Theatre first took part in the festival in 2010 when Norwegian audiences discovered the Mariinsky Ballet Company. On this occasion soloists of the Opera Company and the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers directed by Larisa Gergieva will be taking Gioacchino Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims to Norway (2 and 4 February) as well as an opera gala concert (3 February), which will feature popular opera arias and romances by Russian and European composers. Mikhail Tatarnikov will be conducting.

The lead roles will be performed by Irina Vasilieva (Corinna), Anna Kiknadze and Elena Tsvetkova (Marchesa Melibea), Olga Pudova and Larisa Yudina (Contessa di Folleville), Anastasia Kalagina (Madame Cortese), Dmitry Voropaev and Andrei Ilyushnikov (Chevalier Belfiore), Daniil Shtoda (Count Libenskof), Eduard Tsanga (Lord Sidney), Nikolai Kamensky (Don Profondo), Ilya Bannik (Baron Trombonok) and Viktor Korotich (Don Alvaro).

The festival’s organisers believe that Il viaggio a Reims will be the “highlight of the festival programme.” As the official Norwegian site in Russia Norwegia.ru relates, tickets to see the Mariinsky Opera Company “sold out in record time” as far back as November 2011. “The fact that the Mariinsky Theatre is showing us a full opera specially adapted for the KulturHuset in Tromsø is a historic event; it is clear proof that the Nordlysfestivalen festival is a highly prestigious event,” said the festival’s Artistic and Administrative Director Ulf Jensen.

For details of the festival programme please go to: www.nordlysfestivalen.no