"This year's festival will last for 50 days. It will be a real arts marathon, and [to go through it] will take real effort," he said.
Maestro said that a culmination of the festival would be the first night of Mikhail Glinka's opera 'Life for the Tsar' staged by Dmitry Chernyakov. This staging will be devoted to the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth. "For years we have been preparing ourselves for this play. Our mission is to make a performance that will be worthy of the date," Gergiev said.
Life for the Tsar opened the first season - 1860 - of the Mariinsky Theater renamed Kirovsky in the Soviet times, but since 1939 the theater performed only a censored version of the play - 'Ivan Susanin.' In the Glinka's jubilee year the original version of his opera will come back to the stage.
Other events of the jubilee celebration will pass in the Theater Square (performance 'Tribute to Glinka'), and in the theater where 'Ruslan and Lyudmila" will be played in the scenery renowned Russian artists Alexander Golovin and Konstantin Korovin wrote for the 1904 version.
Also on the agenda is the 'Glinka and Musical Theater' round-table discussion, and the St. Petersburg State Museum for Theater and Musical Arts will hold an exhibition devoted to the prominent composer.
The program of the festival includes all in all over 60 plays and concerts to be hosted by the Mariinsky Theater, Hermitage Theater, and St. Petersburg Music Conservatory.
Festival's plays will be also performed in Kaliningrad (a large Russian city and center of the Russian exclave in the Baltic Kaliningrad Region), and in the towns of Vyborg, Ivangorod, and Tikhvin of the Leningrad Region (around St. Petersburg - Ed.). The Vyborg Fortress will present Wagner's 'Flying Dutchman', and Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia' will be performed near the Tikhvin's Bogoroditsky Monastery. The latter event will be part of the celebration of Our Lady of Tikhvin icon's return to Russia (Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin - Ed.).
As its opera contribution to the festival, Mariinsky Theater will for the first time present Saint-Saens's 'Samson et Dalila' staged by Charles Roubeau, Dmitry Shostakovich's 'Nose' staged by Yuri Aleksandrov, and Rimsky-Korsakov's "Snowmaiden' staged by Alexander Galibin, all with the Mariinsky's top voices - Olga Borodina, Anna Netrebko, and Vladimir Galuzin, famous Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto, and soprano Barbara Frittoli.
As to the ballet, the Mariinsky's company will present the 'A Century of Balanchin' series devoted to the 100th anniversary of this outstanding choreographer of the past century. Not only his plays, but also those developed by his predecessors and followers - Marius Petipa, Fyodor Lopukhov, Bronislava Nizhinskaya, and William Forsythe - will be shown. These ballets will engage dancers from the Perm Theater of Opera and Ballet, Opera de Paris, American Ballet Theater, and New York City Ballet, as well as Mariinsky's company.
In addition, the international exhibition and conference 'A Century of Balanchin' will be held in the Mariinsky and Hermitage Theaters.
The focus of the symphonic musical program of the festival will be on Mariinsky's orchestra directed by Valeri Gergiev.
The White Night Stars will end on July 18 by a traditional ball held in the Yekateririnsky Palace of Tsarskoye Selo (St. Petersburg's suburb, formerly a Russian emperors' residence).
