The Artistic Director of the Mariinsky Theater, Maestro Valery Gergiev, and renowned ballerina Maya Plisetskaya opened the concert with greetings and expressed their gratitude to General Satellite, their partners and the pioneers of 3D television in Russia and Eastern Europe. Together they invited the audience and their younger colleagues into the world of new technological experiences.

A special presentation of the ballet broadcast was also organized in Moscow.

“For me, a person who spent a significant part of my life with a TV – at first it was a black-and-white television, later it was a colored Rubin and it often showed ballet, which has always been an indispensable part of Soviet cultural life – this is definitely an absolute miracle, I have a feeling that something has changed radically,” said journalist and musical theater historian Ilya Kukharenko. “It is of course a new page in history. I myself would like to see opera shows in 3D. That would be interesting.”

This breakthrough changed the history of television and gave a new turn not only to covering theatrical shows, but all other types of TV content, such as sports or live nature shows.

The signal was transmitted in an open format, so that everyone who had special equipment and subscribes to HD satellite could have gotten the impression of being present at the Mariinsky Concert Hall while sitting in front of their own home television.

As part of the “The Year of Russia” being celebrated in France, the Mariinsky ballet gala concert was also shown in 3D at a special reception in the residence of the Russian ambassador in Paris.

The gala concert program included pieces of ballets from the gold fund of the Mariinsky Theater, performed by worldwide ballet stars including Ulyana Lopatkina, Irma Nioradze, Victoria Tereshkina, Alina Somova, Igor Zelensky, Leonid Sarafanov, Vladimir Shklyarov and others. The breakthrough concert opened the 10th anniversary of the International Mariinsky Ballet Festival.

Diana El-Bakri, RT