OREANDA-NEWS. July 16, 2010. From 16 through 26 July 2010, the State Hermitage is holding the 9th "Grand Waltz" International Music Festival in St. Petersburg with the support of the Bank of Moscow.

The festival’s 11 concerts, to commemorate the number of seasons Johann Strauss spent in St. Petersburg, will be held at the city’s best concert venues: the Winter Palace, the Hermitage Theatre, the Grand Peterhoff Palace, Ekaterina’s Palace in Tsarskoye Selo and the Pavlovsk Rose Pavilion. The concerts will cover the genres of evenings of symphony music, vocal and literature and musical evenings.

Concert guests will include, as is customary, well-known Russian and foreign performers: the State Symphony Orchestra of St. Petersburg under Vladimir Ziva, the V.V.Andreyev State Folk Instrument Orchestra under Dmitriy Khokhlov, the Classika State Symphony Orchestra under Alexander Kantorov, the Admiralty Orchestra of the Leningrad Navy base, People’s Performer of Russia Sergey Stadler, Merited Performer of Russia Vladimir Mishchuk, soloists of the Vienna Opera Herwig Pecoraro and Marcela Cerno, and the conductor and soloist Peter Gut.

At the press conference held in the Hermitage Theatre, the Director of the State Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovskiy noted the importance of the festival for the revival of national culture and thanked the management of the Bank of Moscow for their many years’ support for the project.

In turn, the Director of the St. Petersburg branch of the Bank of Moscow Alexander Volkov thanked the management of the Hermitage for the honour of co-operating with one of the world’s biggest museums and noted that the Bank of Moscow attached great significance to supporting cultural projects.

The Bank of Moscow has been co-operating the State Hermitage since 2005 года. The Bank has been the general sponsor of the "Grand Waltz" festival for the last 5 years running.