Nesvizh 2025. Post Factum

 

ПАРТНЕРЫ ПРОЕКТА

 

 

 

 

 

The Central Courtyard of the Nesvizh Castle seats 1,040 people, its Theatre Hall seats 110 people, and all the performances were almost sold out!

Traditionally, a press conference was the first in a series of events within the project. Its speakers included the artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus, People's Artist of the Republic of Bashkortostan Artem Makarov, chairman of the Nesvizh District Council of Deputies Svetlana Antonchik, first deputy director of the Nesvizh Museum Natalia Zherko, director of the theatre’s ballet company, Honoured Artist of Russia Igor Kolb, and principal designer of the theatre Lyubov Sidelnikova.

13 performances were presented within three days. Almost all ensembles of the theatre (375 people!) went to Nesvizh to give the audience the joy of meeting with real art. Opera and ballet performances, concerts... This year, residents of 19 countries joined the celebration in Nesvizh – Belarus, Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Luxembourg, the USA, the UK, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, Brazil, Latvia, Ireland, Italy being among them.

The programme of the festival included eight concerts in the Theatre Hall of the Palace and one in the Church of Corpus Domini. Two fairy-tale ballets, namely The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky and Scheherazade to the music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, opened the Evenings of the Bolshoi Theatre at the Radziwill Castle. The premiere of this season, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin produced by the director Anna Motornaya, continued the festival on the main stage of the palace in the courtyard. The enchanting gala concert of opera and ballet stars, staged by Oksana Volkova, was the final point of the fete. The emotions of these three days can be seen in the photos.

Festival in Figures

The opera and ballet festival in Nesvizh was launched in 2010 and became a real celebration, moreover, a great event in the cultural life of the country. The choice of the venue for the cultural project was no coincidence: back in the middle of the 18th century, Princess Urszula Radziwill founded a professional theatre here, where opera and ballet productions were staged. Three centuries passed, and the Radziwill Castle in Nesvizh again gathers opera and ballet admirers.

In 2010, the stalls of the Courtyard of the Palace seated 600 people, and now, after 15 editions of the festival, there are over 1,000 seats! According to statistics, the Evenings of the Bolshoi Theatre at the Radziwill Castle gather about 4,000 spectators each year. The festival very quickly occupied several venues: in addition to the Courtyard of the Palace, the Theatre Hall (110 seats) and the Church of Corpus Domini host the festival (admission to the concerts held by the theatre here is always free).

Since the very first edition of the festival, its main format has established: for three evenings in a line, the audience can attend a ballet performance and opera performance, as well as a gala concert of the stars of the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus. In 2010, four events were held as part of the Evenings of the Bolshoi Theatre at the Radziwill Castle, while this year, 15 years later, there were thirteen.

In 2012, the Bolshoi Theatre already brought Eugene Onegin to Nesvizh; this year, the audience enjoyed this brilliant Tchaikovsky’s work staged by Anna Motornaya – this season’s premiere.

It is amazing that in 2015, the Evenings of the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus at the Radziwill Castle opened with the ballets Scheherazade and The Firebird, and these titles opened the current 10th anniversary festival in Nesvizh this summer.

For the second year in a row, the ground squirrel was the symbol of the festival.

In 2005, the speckled ground squirrel was listed in the Red Book of Belarus – it’s a cute, charming animal that lives... in Nesvizh! That is why this cute rodent became a kind of symbol of our festival "Evenings of the Bolshoi Theatre at the Radziwill Castle".

There is a legend that someone from the influential Radziwill family, either Sierotka (the Orphan) or Panie Kochanku, liked this animal so much that he brought it to his home in Nesvizh. Soon there were a lot of ground squirrels – “like stars in the sky”. But at present only a few colonies of speckled ones live in the Nesvizh fields. Now activists are making every possible effort to preserve Belarusian ground squirrels. The theatre has joined this noble mission, too.