Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theater has been nominated for the Golden Mask Award

Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theater has been nominated for the Golden Mask Award

The Golden Mask was established in 1993 as a professional award for the best works of the season in all types of theatrical art (drama, opera, ballet, modern dance, operetta, musical, puppet theater). The winners of the award are determined at the annual festival of nominated performances. The festival program is supplemented by non-competition projects.

The winners receive a prize - a mask in a square frame, made according to a sketch by the set designer, the People's Artist of the Russian Federation Oleg Sheintsis. The artist based it on the mask of the Venetian carnival, adding to it an element of Russian state symbols - the double-headed eagle.

A distinctive feature of the expert council of the current season of the Golden Mask was that its composition had significantly expanded compared to previous years, and it included respected, eminent figures of the musical theater: practicing musicians, teachers, conductors, directors, choreographers, and artists.

In the 2023-2024 season, 734 applications from different cities and regions of Russia were received for the award in six independent competitions. The geography of the theaters that applied for the competition is quite vast: from Vladivostok, Yakutsk, Khabarovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, to the regions of central Russia - Samara, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Yoshkar-Ola, etc. 567 applications were selected.

The Astrakhan State Opera and Ballet Theater was included in the list of 49 applicants. So, the performance Love for Three Oranges (director A. Smirnov), the premiere of which took place in April last year was nominated as "Best Performance of the Year. Opera".

The opera Love for Three Oranges by S. Prokofiev will be shown in Moscow in April and May this year. Performances of the Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theater have repeatedly been shortlisted for the Russian National Golden Mask Award.

The Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theater Valery Voronin was nominated for the national theater award "Golden Mask" for the best work of a conductor in the performance Love for Three Oranges by S. Prokofiev.

Elena Bodrova and Sergey Skornetsky were nominated for the award as "Best Set Designer. Musical Theater" and "Best Lighting Work. Musical Theater" for their work on the performance Love for Three Oranges. 

"This is a significant event for our entire team to be among the top five performances of the National Theater Award "Golden Mask". We will remember this season as difficult and eventful, but it proved that the theater is in demand as never before. We put a piece of our soul into each performance, and this did not go unnoticed." 

– the Artistic Director and Chief Conductor 

of the Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theatre

Valery Voronin