From August 26 to September 1, the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will make a week-long tour of Stockholm (Sweden) and Edinburgh (Scotland), presenting a pair of ballets choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky. Rodion Shchedrin’s The Little Humpbacked Horse will be performed on the stage of the Royal Swedish Opera as part the Baltic Sea Festival on August 26 & 27, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Cinderella will be performed at the Edinburgh International Festival on August 30, 31 and September 1 (matinee and evening).

On September 2 & 3, the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will appear in Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Ljubljana (Slovenia). Both concerts will feature works by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The concert in Eindhoven will be dedicated to the 20th anniversary since the opening of the Frits Philips Muziekgebouw Concert Hall. During the last decade, the Mariinsky Theatre and Valery Gergiev have almost every year been participating in the Ljubljana Festival, Slovenia’s annual cultural forum and one of the most famous music festivals in Europe, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.

On September 9, members of the Mariinsky Opera, Chorus and Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will give a concert at the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival held annually in Rotterdam (Netherlands), where they will perform Verdi’s Otello. The title role will be sung by tenor Alexander Antonenko, who previously appeared with the Mariinsky Opera in a pair of performances — he sang Herman in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades in Frankfurt am Main in February this year as well as Otello at the Mariinsky Concert Hall in St Petersburg as part of the 20th Stars of the White Nights Music Festival in June.

From September 10 to 14, the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will give a series of concerts in a few Russian cities. Concert venues and programmes will be announced later, when all aspects of the Russian tour confirmed.

On September 15 & 16, the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will appear with a pair of concerts in Beijing (China) at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, performing Shostakovich’s symphonies and piano concertos (soloist Alexander Toradze). The National Centre for the Performing Arts, a large cultural complex of an ellipsoid dome of titanium and glass surrounded by an artificial lake, it hosts three halls (the Opera Hall, the Music Hall and the Theatre Hall) under one roof and was officially opened in December 2007, shortly before the Summer Olympics in Beijing. The Mariinsky Opera and the Mariinsky Ballet were the first opera and ballet companies that performed at the Opera Hall during a two-week-long series of inaugural performances. The Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev played the complete Tchaikovsky symphonies cycle at the Music Hall in September 2011.

In August and September, Valery Gergiev will conduct orchestras that all have close relationship to his musical career — the London Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Valery Gergiev holds a position of the Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra since 2007, he is one of the honorary conductors of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducting one or two concerts a year with this band in Stockholm, and he served as the Principal Conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra from 1995 to 2008.

From August 16 to 19, Valery Gergiev will appear at the Edinburgh International Festival. Alongside the musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra, violinists Nicola Benedetti and Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Denis Matsuev, he will present a cycle of two violin concertos and four symphonies by Karol Szymanowski and four symphonies of Johannes Brahms. Each of the four evenings of the cycle will be contrasting classical Brahms’ symphonies with late-romantic Szymanowski’s ones. Last year, Valery Gergiev was appointed Honorary President of the Edinburgh International Festival, a prestigious arts and music festival in Britain that was founded in 1947. The complete Brahms & Szymanowski cycle will be performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev in London, Paris and Luxembourg during In September-December and will be recorded on LSO Live, the Orchestra’s own record label.

Musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev will play Sergei Prokofiev’s Cinderella (complete ballet score) at the BBC Proms in London on August 22, at the Salzburg Festival on August 23 and the Lucerne Festival on August 24.

On August 25, Valery Gergiev will conduct the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a concert that marks ten years since the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm was founded. Created in 2003 by composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, director of Berwaldhallen Michael Tydén and Valery Gergiev, the Festival has the aim of to drawing public attention to environmental issues in the Baltic region. The Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra alongside Valery Gergiev in this concert.

Valery Gergiev will conduct the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in a pair of concerts on September 7 & 8 that will open the 17th edition of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival. Together with the Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen and the Armenian cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan Valery Gergiev will present a pair of programs, one of which (on September 7) is made up of works by the Russian composers — Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev and Rodion Shchedrin, and the other one (on September 8) — of those by the Western Europeans — Max Reger, Richard Strauss and Henri Dutilleux. Valery Gergiev’s Festival in Rotterdam is being held annually since 1996, every year presenting a set of unusually programmed concerts and other cultural events. This year’s Festival edition is based upon a theme Sea & You and provides an opportunity to experience the sea as the mirror of a human being. The Festival will run from September 7 to 15.