• People’s Artist of Russia (2011)
• Honoured Worker of the Arts of Russia (1998)
Alexander Petrov was born in 1949. In 1974 he graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad State Conservatory. From 1974 to 1986 Petrov was a director at Leningrad’s Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre (now the Mikhailovsky Theatre), where he staged Rigoletto, Iolanta, Gianni Schicchi, Man of La Mancha and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium (for the first time in Russia) among others.
In 1987, together with the conductor Pavel Bubelnikov, Alexander Petrov created the St Petersburg State Musical Theatre for Children Zazerkalye, where he is Artistic Director to this day. Petrov has staged over one hundred and ten productions in Russia and abroad, including over ninety ones at his theatre (Children’s Album, Iolanta, Eugene Onegin, The Tsar’s Bride, Die Zauberflöte, Der Schauspieldirektor, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, Christmas Mystery, The Tale of the Nightingale, the Emperor and Death, L’elisir d’amore, La Cenerentola, L’italiana in Algeri, Decameron, Otello, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Gianni Schicchi, L’Histoire du soldat, Carmen, Die Fledermaus, Noye’s Fludde, Porgy and Bess, West Side Story, Kashtanka Passion, Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbit among many others). Music by modern composers, including Leonid Desyatnikov, Sergei Banevich, Gennady Banshchikov, Stanislav Vazhov, Olga Petrova, Igor Rogalyov, Irina Tseslyukevich and Yefrem Podgaits, occupies a large place in the repertoire of Alexander Petrov’s theatre.
Collaborates with various theatres in Russia and abroad. The most significant productions by Petrov include Il trovatore and Boris Godunov at the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet State Theatre, Colas Breugnon and Boris Godunov at the Stara Zagora State Opera (Bulgaria; 1st prize and the Palm Branch prize at a festival in Sofia), Iolanta at the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Centre (Gold Diploma in the category “Best opera production” at the Moscow Theatre Festival) and The Twelve Months at the Moscow State Opera and Ballet Theatre for Young Audience named after Natalia Sats. He also worked with theatres in St Petersburg, among them the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre (musical Le Bourgeois gentilhomme), the Bryantsev Young Spectators’ Theatre (Klein Zaches), the Theatre on Liteiny (Mistress into Maid) and the Akimov Comedy Theatre (Ladies and Hussars), as well as theatres in Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Saratov, Novosibirsk, Krasnodar, Minsk, Odessa, Warsaw and Baku.
At the Mariinsky Theatre Alexander Petrov staged The Love for Three Oranges (1991; production revival: 2022), Le Rossignol (1995), The Tale of Tsar Saltan (2005), Le nozze di Figaro (2009) and L’elisir d’amore (2013).
In 1978 he became a teacher at the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music and Film, and now he is a professor of the Department of Musical Theatre and Variety Arts at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts (St Petersburg).
Since 2004 Alexander Petrov has been Artistic Director of the Russian National Award and Festival of Theatre Art for Children Harlequin. Recipient of the St Petersburg City Government Prize for 1995, 2004, 2008 and 2020, the Prize of the St Petersburg Branch of the Union of Theatre Workers of the Russian Federation (2008), the Golden Sofit, St Petersburg’s most prestigious theatre prize (1996, 2001, 2011), and a special prize of Russia’s Golden Mask National Theatre Award – “For outstanding contribution to the development of theatre” (2022).
Information for October 2022
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