Epiphany Festival at the New Opera Theatre

From January 19 to February 4, 2026, the traditional Epiphany Festival is taking place at the Moscow New Opera Theatre named after Evgeny Vladimirovich Kolobov. It has been held since 2005 and always opens on January 19 – on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord God and our Savior Jesus Christ, and on the birthday of the theater's founder, the outstanding Russian conductor Evgeny Vladimirovich Kolobov. This year's musical marathon is special because it is dedicated to the jubilee date – the 80th anniversary of Evgeny Kolobov's birth. And the entire program is connected with his name.

The Maestro considered his profession the most difficult and tragic. The conductor said that if he were to live life again, he would not choose it. But he devoted himself entirely to his work because he was a knight of music. And also a patriot who loved his country and honestly gave his talent to people. Sold-out houses in his theater are proof of that.

The first performance of this year's Epiphany Festival was the premiere of the opera The Tsar's Bride by Russian classic Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov. The Tsar's Bride held a special place in Maestro Kolobov's life, said Anton Getman, director of the New Opera. “His only daughter was born at the moment when he was conducting this opera at the Sverdlovsk Opera and Ballet Theater in 1970. Evgeny Vladimirovich named his heiress Martha, after the opera's main heroine. He dreamed of staging Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride on the stage of his Moscow theater but did not have time. We dedicate this new production by contemporary director Evgeny Pisarev to the memory of Evgeny Vladimirovich Kolobov.”

The Tsar's Bride is the ninth opera by Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov. The libretto is based on Lev Mey's play. This is a historical drama set during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. At the center of the plot is the Tsar's third wife, Martha Sobakina, who died two weeks after the wedding.

Music lovers came to the premiere at the New Opera with great expectations because the invited director, artistic director of the Pushkin Theatre Evgeny Pisarev, is a master at surprising and delighting audiences. For the New Opera, he created a one-intermission production. The director removed the scenes with the oprichniki. The main theme became the love story of the heroes. Artist Zinovy Margolin created sets suited to the chamber stage. The main scenery is the Kremlin wall and a platform with stairs leading up. An allegory of the path of the main heroine Martha, daughter of Novgorod merchant Vasily Sobakin, who became the bride of Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible. The orchestra was placed under the stage, thereby expanding the space for the artists, who performed their parts on the forestage – and, it must be said, magnificently. Among them were Anastasia Lepeshinskaya as Lyubasha, Alexey Neklyudov as boyar Ivan Lykov, Maria Buynosova as Martha, Chingiz Bairou as Grigory Gryaznoy, Konstantin Fedotov as Malyuta Skuratov, and Maxim Ostroukhov as Bomelius.

The musical director and guest conductor of the premiere production of The Tsar's Bride at the New Opera Theatre was People's Artist of Russia Dmitry Liss, who has been the artistic director of the Ural Academic Philharmonic Orchestra for over 30 years. From the first bars of the overture, Maestro Liss enchanted and constructed his own, much more meaningful Tsar's Bride. In places, it became emotionally charged and even frightening. In the conductor's interpretation, one could hear how the poisoned potion slowly dissolved in the goblet of the Tsar's bride – the opera's main heroine. And there wasn't a single dynamic excess. Dmitry Liss's participation became not a formal but a powerful trump card of the new production.

The Epiphany Festival program will feature the world premiere of the performance Two with music by Nastasya Khrushcheva in a production by Alla Sigalova. The line of Russian music will continue with compositions by Rachmaninoff and Medtner in a so-called “inverted concert.” Audiences await a performance by the Merited Collective of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under Nikolai Alekseev. The festival closes with a concert version of Andrey Golovin's opera First Love, written in 1997 on Kolobov's commission and staged by him as director at the time. In general, the musical events of this year's jubilee program in one way or another reveal different facets of the unique personality of the theater's founder, Evgeny Vladimirovich Kolobov.