• Festival premiere: Aida, opera 11 & 14 June, 8 & 29 July
• Season premiere: Le Parc, ballet 13 & 14 June
• Symphonic concerts: Leonidas Kavakos & Valery Gergiev 16, 17 & 18 June
• Mariinsky Label online competition: winners announced [27 May]

11 and 14 June, 8 and 29 July at the Mariinsky Concert Hall will see the most anticipated operatic premiere of the Stars of the White Nights Festival — Aida by Giuseppe Verdi directed by the renowned director, writer, choreographer and clown, Daniele Finzi Pasca. Magician Finzi Pasca who staged the famous show Corteo for Cirque du Soleil, the closing ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Turin and received a huge success presenting Donka in Russia — a Letter to Chekhov to his own script — now presents Aida, one of the most popular Verdi’s operas. Valery Gergiev will conduct the premiere.

Daniele Finzi Pasca: “In Aida, my director’s idea is to make the play in an unexpected form, in a sense, to turn the stereotypical perception of this opera. I am planning to undertake drastic changes — I want to create an atmosphere of involvement in the play as a hockey stadium when the audience starts to cheer for the players, being in close proximity with the actors.”

Valery Gergiev: “We are working with Finzi Pasca for about a year. The idea is to make Aida for the Mariinsky Concert Hall as a bright, democratic performance, which can go quite often. Not comparing it with the well-known production of Die Zauberflöte which was already presented at the Mariinsky Concert Hall for about hundred times, from my point of view, this is a sign of success or failure of a performance. I do not make a secret that with Aida I expect that this performance will not be created for just one season, but this is rather a long-term investment.”

13 and 14 June at the Mariinsky Theatre will see the main ballet season premiere — Le Parc with choreography by Angelin Preljocaj. One of the best French ballets of the last two decades now reached the Russian stage. The choreographer, who directed the rehearsals of our ballet troupe, has adapted his original 1994 version he created for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris. Using beautiful Adagios from Mozart’s Piano Concertos, the choreographer staged a ballet about courtship strategy by creating a three-act play of passion, ending it with the birth of real Love. On 13 June principal roles will be performed by Yekaterina Kondaurova and Yuri Smekalov, on 14 June — by Viktoria Tereshkina and Alexander Sergeyev. These pairs of dancers specially casted by Mr. Preljocaj, demonstrated a wide range of interpretations, filling the “graceful French Thing” with new interesting ideas. The result is a sensual and beautiful spectacle in the interior of Louis XV.

16, 17 and 18 June at the Mariinsky Concert Hall will be starring the famous Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos in three concerts with the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre under Valery Gergiev. Leonidas Kavakos is one of the most famous and sought after violinists in the world and works closely with leading orchestras and conductors. He regularly appears at major international festivals with symphony and chamber orchestras, and also gives recitals in famous concert halls all over the world. At the Stars of the White Nights Festival the artist will perform violin concertos by Shostakovich and Sibelius. To Leonidas Kavakos, who has won international recognition at an early age, and in 1985 became the winner of the International Sibelius Violin Competition, Violin Concerto by Sibelius (will be played twice: on 16 and 18 June) is one the most dear works, which reveals the depth of his talent.

Two fundamentally different Shostakovich Symphonies: Twelfth and Fourteenth, will be performed over these three concerts. Twelfth Symphony, 1917, together with the Eleventh Symphony, 1905, forms a dilogy of events of the two Russian revolutions of the beginning of the twentieth century. Twelfth Symphony reflects the style of Shostakovich rather well, demonstrating the composer’s ability to create a truly talented works in a challenging time for everyone, who lived and worked in the years of the Soviet Union. In the Fourteenth Symphony, dominating moods are protest, despair, fear of nothingness and, at the same time, attraction to them. It is a unique negative of the Requiem: in structure it is closer to a mass for the dead, though in content it is not. Although both symphonies have a clearly declared program, today we look at them in a wider context, perceiving Shostakovich’s legacy in terms of the scale of his personality and the tremendous heritage of the composer-symphonist who has stood the test of time.

Exactly two weeks ago, on 27 May, we celebrated the birthday of the Mariinsky Label, our own record label. We ran a day-long online competition. On that day, at the start of each hour from 10:00AM until 6:00PM, on the official pages of the Mariinsky Theatre in social networks VKontakte, Facebook and twitter we published questions related to the Mariinsky Label releases. We’ve published nine questions — the number of releases already produced to date. Winners were recognized by those who first gave the correct answer to any of the questions. Through social networks we sent individual messages to each of the nine winners, in order to get their contact information for sending their awards. Prizes in the competition are Mariinsky Label CDs, each one related to their questions.