OREANDA-NEWS. June 03, 2013. The 21st Stars of the White Nights Festival opened at the Mariinsky Theatre on 24 May with the support of VTB Bank. This is the first year that the festival will be held on three stages: the Mariinsky Theatre original stage, as well as its New Theatre and Concert Hall. The festival opened with the premier of Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s opera Rusalka (The Mermaid) staged by Vasily Barkhatov.

The festival will run until 28 July 2013. VTB Bank is the title sponsor of the festival and the staging of Rusalka.

The main event of this year’s Stars of the White Nights Festival will be the global premier of Levsha (The Lefthander), an opera composed by Rodion Shchedrin on a commission by the Mariinsky Theatre for its new stage. The opera is dedicated to conductor Valery Gergiev, general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre. The festival’s ballet premier will be Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH choreographed for the New York City Ballet to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No 2 in F Major.

The festival will also feature the first ever 3D broadcast of the ballet Swan Lake starring Yekaterina Kondaurova shown at the original Mariinsky Theatre on 6 June 2013. The performance will be broadcast live to 1,200 movie theatres in 50 countries.

The festival’s 10-week programme includes around 120 performances and concerts featuring guest performers as well as the Mariinsky Theatre’s own opera and ballet stars, chorus and symphonic orchestra.

This year VTB Bank will also co-finance a performance of the ballet Onegin at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, adapted for stage by John Cranko, as well as the exhibition, Natalia Goncharova: Between the West and the East, at the State Tretyakov Gallery. The bank will sponsor an exhibition of Russian painter and draftsman Filipp Malyavin at the State Russian Museum and help to organise a concert of Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Anna Netrebko in Red Square, the Diaghilev P.S. international festival of arts, as well as several other major cultural events.