Ruptly
"The 'Classics at Palace Square' gala concert was held in St Petersburg on Friday as part of celebrations marking the city's 323rd anniversary. Footage shows performers taking the stage in Dvortsovaya Square against the backdrop of the Winter Palace, with the programme blending opera, operetta, Neapolitan songs and contemporary music. Concert director Elena Galanova said the show takes around a year to prepare, with each appearance designed as a separate mini-performance. "The programme takes a year to prepare, and each number involves a huge number of sketches, a huge amount of effort and work involved in creating costumes and video backdrops, as well as the musical material," she said, adding that some pieces include new arrangements created specially for the event. Galanova said this year's concert moved from classical composers such as Rossini and Verdi through operetta and popular 20th-century music to modern songs not usually included in the singers' regular repertoire. "They are learning these pieces specifically for this concert, for City Day, for 'Classics at the Palace Square', so to speak, just for this one occasion, to perform them before the St Petersburg audience," she explained. Cellist Borislav Strulev described taking part in the concert as a 'special honour,' praising the scale of the production and the role given to the cello. "We always put together some very interesting, simply enchanting performances, where the cello really comes into its own and becomes an opera soloist in its own right," he said. The concert featured performers including Marco Chaponni, Mariam Battistelli, Igor Golovatenko, Maria Barakova and Andrei Danilov. Artem Abashev conducted the St Petersburg Philharmonic Academic Symphony Orchestra, while Vladimir Begletsov led the choir. The stage in front of the Winter Palace covered around 600 square metres. The audience watched 23 musical and theatrical performances accompanied by multimedia backdrops created by leading video artists."
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