St. Petersburg’s White Nights Festival is the brainchild of Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the Kirov, based in the Mariinsky Theatre. The festival “provides an intensive dose of music and opera against the crumbling backdrop of Russia’s intellectual capital, at a fraction of the cost of rival events further to the west. Alongside War and Peace, one of this year’s highlights is Prokofiev’s opera ‘Semyon Kotko’, a four-hour epic with a difficult history that combines some challenging music with a heavy dose of Soviet-era ideology.” – Culturekiosque