Portuguese Capital Hosts Festival Of Russian Music

A festival of Russian music opens in the Portuguese capital on Friday. The event, entitled Holiday of Russian Music, is held in the framework of annual concert programs dedicated to the world's prominent musicians. The program of three-day festival, which is regarded as a major event in the cultural life of Portugal, envisages more than 100 concerts. Visitors of the country's largest concert hall, Belen, will listen to Portuguese and foreign orchestras perform music by Glinka, Musorgsky, Borodin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Rakhmaninov, Skryabin, and Stravinsky. The program includes guest appearances by Russian pianists, violinists, cellists, the St. Petersburg symphony orchestra, and the choir of the Moscow patriarchate. The supplement to the Friday issue of Lisbon's Publico newspaper contains a brief anthology of Russian music and a CD with fragments of Russian classical music. The Holiday of Russian Music was sponsored by the European Union and a number of companies and organisations from Portugal and abroad.