ST. PETERSBURG INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OPERA FOR EVERYONE

27 August 2020

St. Petersburg hosted the IX St. Petersburg International Festival Opera for Everyone, an annual city event that has traditionally aroused great interest among the locals and guests of the city for many years.

Due to the difficult epidemiological situation and the limited number of viewers, online broadcasts have become the main format of the event in 2020. The online broadcast of the opening of the festival - the opera Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky - was watched by over 1 million people. More than 400 thousand spectators have watched the opera Rusalka by Dargomyzhsky. The opera The Capulets and the Montagues gathered about 300 thousand spectators on TV screens and mobile devices. The closing audience of the festival - opera The Magic Flute, amounted to almost 600 thousand people.

This year, several surprises awaited the audience of the festival: the performance of The Capulets and the Montagues was decorated with fabulous acrobatic performances, street dances and graffiti. In addition, animals took part in the performance as well, such as a German shepherd, two aristocratic greyhounds and white doves.

During the difficult period of coronavirus, the festival retained its social orientation. Due to quarantine measures, it was not possible to adhere to the format of past years, when anyone could attend an open-air event. But the performances did not take place without the presence of spectators - doctors from hospitals of St. Petersburg were invited to the opera performances - heroes of our time, who daily fight covid-19.