Thursday, May 12, 2005



I first heard about it on NTV (in Russian) yesterday: the Poles decided to boycott the Bolshoi's performances after Putin had failed to mention Poland's role in the WWII - but then it turned out that the Bolshoi wasn't touring Poland at all...

Here's yesterday's statement on the impostors from the Bolshoi's press service (in Russian):

The Bolshoi Theater Did Not Organize the Polish Tour

Due to a large number of media reports about the problems related to "the Bolshoi Tour" of Poland, the theater's directors are forced to make this statement:

The last tour of Poland by the Bolshoi's opera troupe took place in December 2002. The Bolshoi Theater performed Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges in Warsaw, and the shows earned great acclaim from the Polish audience and critics.

The Bolshoi Theater neither planned nor organized tours of this country ever since. And the current tour, which the media call "the Bolshoi Theater Tour," is, in fact, not related to Bolshoi. A series of concerts, in which opera and ballet soloists from Moscow's musical theaters take part, are somehow being carried out using the Bolshoi's brand and the Theater's old logo that hasn't been used in the last two years. The responsibility for this lies solely with the organizers of the concert tour.

It has been a personal initiative of certain Bolshoi soloists currently on vacation to participate in the concerts in Poland.

The Bolshoi Theater's press service

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