The Festino chamber chorus was founded in 2008 and was named in honour of Adriano Banchieri’s madrigal comedy Festino nella sera del giovedì grasso.
The ensemble’s Artistic Director and Conductor is Alexandra Makarova. The chorus performs Renaissance and Baroque music and works by contemporary composers and collaborates with Russian and European early music ensembles.
In 2012 the Festino chorus took part in the I Open Academy of Baroque Opera directed by Andrew Lawrence-King and Marco Beasley, while in 2014 it took part in the MolOt festival and the contemporary music festival From the Avant-Garde to the Present Day. The same year, the musicians of Festino became the main performers in the musical puppet performance Leningrad Suite, dedicated to the seventieth anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad (with the children’s theatre Puppets). The chorus is a guest ensemble of the Bolshoi Tovstonogov Drama Theatre, at which it appears in the play What to Do? (staged by Andrei Moguchy to music by Nastasia Khrushcheva).
March 2015 saw the premiere of a co-production by the TRU theatre and the Festino chorus of A New Day (music by Nastasia Khrushcheva).
The ensemble won the Grand Prix at the Northern Bel Canto international chorus competition in Stnbsp;Petersburg and 1st prize at the International Chorus Competition in Miltenberg (Germany).
