The Fifth International Festival July 1–7, 2004

The annual international festival of Flemish music has already become an integral part of Petersburg's cultural life. Every time we are happy to meet brilliant performers and composers from Flanders, an amazing and beautiful corner of Europe, the place where music itself was born many centuries ago in its classical form as we know it today.
This year, you may hear excellent piano and organ music written by Flemish composers in the last three centuries in the Anna Akhmatova Museum and in Lutheran St.Catherine Church. A vocal cycle of Belgian composers to words by A. S. Pushkin, astonishing in its beauty and musicianship and dedicated to the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, will be performed in the Sheremetiev Palace. And the House of Composers will host the Petersburg premiere of the splendid international musical project called The Carnival of Animals. Inspired by the immortal masterpiece of Camille Saint-Saens, prominent composers of Belgium, Russia, England, and Brazil created their mini versions of the Grand Zoological Fantasia, extending the circle of the world fauna presented, and interpreting the merry music of Saint-Saens through the prism of today’s ironical approach.