The XIV International Ballet Festival Mariinsky will run from 3 to 13 April 2014 at the Mariinsky Theatre and the Mariinsky II and will open with the premiere of the three-act ballet Sylvia to music by Léo Delibes with choreography by Frederick Ashton

On 2 April at 17:30 you are invited to attend a press-conference focussing on the Mariinsky Ballet Festival with Acting Director of the ballet company Yuri Fateyev and ballet masters taking part in the project A Creative Workshop of Young Choreographers

From 30 March to 13 April Valery Gergiev will be conducting eleven concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra. The concert programmes focus on symphony music by Alexander Scriabin and Olivier Messiaen

On 28 March Anastasia Kolegova will be performing the role of the Firebird in the eponymous ballet for the first time, Yaroslav Pushkov and Tatiana Tiliguzova will be making their debuts in Chopiniana and Anastasia Zaklinskaya will be appearing as one of the odalisques in Schéhérazade

The Children’s Chorus of Russia, featuring a thousand children from all of the country’s regions, and the Mariinsky Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev have released their first recording – the song Music of the Sun. The soloist is Timur Slanov and the recording was produced in January 2014 in the acoustically perfect surroundings of the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre

On 28 March at 17:00 at the Mariinsky II under the baton of Valery Gergiev there will be a performance by a Sino-Russian youth orchestra assembled especially for the occasion

On 24 March mezzo-soprano Elena Sommer will be performing the role of Geneviève in Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande for the first time (production by Daniel Kramer)

As part of the Musorgsky Festival, on 23 March there will be a marathon of concerts in all of the chamber halls of the Mariinsky-II

On 20 and 21 March maestro Gergiev will be performing concerts with the Rotterdam Philharmonic at the De Doelen Concert Hall in Rotterdam

In the matinee performance on 23 March Nadezhda Gonchar will be making her debut as Syuimbike in Leonid Yakobson's ballet Shurale