ST PETERSBURG'S WALTZ FESTIVAL TO REVIVE MUSIC PERFORMANCE TRADITIONS OF 19TH CENTURY

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ST. PETERSBURG, July 2 (RIA Novosti) - The third international festival Grand Waltz has opened in St. Petersburg on Friday.

According to City Hall's Culture & Arts Committee, this year's forum will feature soloists of the Mariinsky (Kirov) company, the Hermitage Theater orchestra, Petersburg Conservatory Chancellor Sergei Roldugin, and the Austrian conductor Christian Pollack, a specialist in authentic performance of Johann Strauss' music, to name just a few participants.

Along with world-famous Strauss pieces, they will play rarely performed waltzes and romances to lyrics by Olga Smirnitskaya, the composer's Russian sweetheart.

The festival's events will be held in various venues across the city and in suburban imperial retreats, including the Hermitage Theater, the Constantine Palace, the Grand Palace at Peterhoff, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, and the Rose Pavilion at Pavlovsk, where the Austrian composer performed at various points in his life.

The idea behind the Grand Waltz festival is to revive music performance traditions of St. Petersburg and Pavlovsk, renowned, among other things, for its "music railway station," organizers say. Erected in the mid-19th century to the designs of Andrei Stakenschneider, the station building houses not only ticket offices and waiting rooms, but also a restaurant, a garden with fountains, and a concert hall with a seating capacity of over a hundred people. A Strauss-led orchestra graced this hall for ten seasons in a row (1856 through 1866). Operatic stars such as Fyodor Shalyapin, Anastasia Vyaltseva, and Ivan Yershov also appeared here. Concerts and recitals ran in Pavlovsk's music railway station for over a hundred years, and the hall was often referred to as the "first Russian philharmonia."

The third international Grand Waltz festival is to continue through July 12.

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