Curtains up as restored Bolshoi stages gala concert

AFTER A SIX-year renovation plagued by scandals, delays and a ballooning budget, Moscow’s renowned Bolshoi theatre will reopen tonight with a glittering gala concert.

President Dmitry Medvedev and prime minister Vladimir Putin will host an event billed as the “rebirth” of one of Russia’s cultural treasures, featuring opera stars Placido Domingo, Angela Gheorghiu and Natalie Dessay and leading ballet dancers Natalia Osipova, Svetlana Zakharova and Ivan Vasiliev.

The €500 million renovation is intended to transform the Bolshoi from a faded, crumbling beauty with appalling acoustics into a world-beating theatre that conceals the most modern sound and stage technology beneath stunning 19th-century facades.

The auditorium has been returned to its original violin shape, and pinewood panels and delicate mouldings have replaced the concrete and plaster that were used to patch up the theatre in Soviet times, destroying its acoustics. Experts say the auditorium will once more act like a huge, resonating musical instrument, amplifying the sound of the orchestra just as its creators intended when the building first opened in 1825.

Master craftsmen were brought from around Russia to work on the theatre, including gilders who followed a centuries-old method of using egg-white and vodka to apply delicate gold leaf, before burnishing it with brushes made from the tail hair of squirrels.

Fine tapestries once more hang on the walls, having been woven in a monastery outside Moscow by a small group of women with the rare skills to replicate tsarist-era fabrics.

Intricate mosaic floors and huge chandeliers have been restored and reassembled piece by tiny piece.

“By the time we closed the theatre for renovation, there was a 70 per cent chance of the building collapsing . . . We had reached a critical point,” said the Bolshoi’s general director Anatoly Iksanov.

The project has run many times and several years over budget and experts believe the official figure of about €500 million does not come close to the real cost.

A criminal investigation for embezzlement is under way against a contractor that was involved in the early stages of renovation, and the pace has only picked up since the Summa Capital company took over in 2009.

“When in the early 2000s it was decided to reconstruct the theatre, no one could foresee the real volume of works . . . Usually in such cases people don’t do repairs but demolish,” said Summa spokesman Mikhail Sidorov. “Today we enter an imperial theatre, and no longer that of the Soviet era,” he said of the restored Bolshoi. “We took everything that we could from the 19th century.” The tsarist-era facades hide state-of-the-art technology, however.

German engineers have installed a huge new stage that can be raised and lowered hydraulically in separate sections; the musicians now have a larger orchestra pit and modern backstage facilities have replaced cramped changing rooms and a mere handful of showers and toilets.

The project has doubled the useable space inside the Bolshoi to 80,000sq m, creating much needed rehearsal and office areas and allowing for construction of a second, soundproofed auditorium below the main stage and within metres of a metro tunnel.

Mr Iksanov said the performers were thrilled to be back in the Bolshoi, and determined to make tonight something to remember for the lucky few with a ticket and the millions worldwide who are expected to watch a live television broadcast of the gala concert.

“The troupes are working without weekends, production staff are on 24 hours a day and nobody grumbles,” he said. “We all have a common drive, and that is to get back to our home.”