On 15 and 16 February the Mariinsky Theatre will be presenting one of the most long-awaited premieres of the season with the support of CIT Finance - Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff, which has only been staged once before at the Mariinsky Theatre.

Working on the premiere are Valery Gergiev (Musical Director and Conductor), Kirill Serebrennikov (Stage Director), Nikolai Simonov (Set Designer), Olga Reznichenko and Kirill Serebrennikov (Costume Designers) and Larisa Gergieva (Musical Preparation).

Falstaff returns to the theatre's repertoire over one hundred years after the first production there in 1894. The St Petersburg premiere took place just one year after the opera's world premiere at Milan's La Scala. The Mariinsky Theatre production was staged by the artistic team of conductor Eduard Napravnik and stage director Osip Palechek. The theatre's designers at the time faithfully recreated the sets of each scene from sketches for the Milan production. The most outstanding singers of the age were engaged in the production, among them Arkady Chernov, Fyodor Stravinsky, Yevgenia Mravina and Maria Slavina.

The stage history of Falstaff in Russia is relatively brief. It was staged only twice in St Petersburg. In December 2005 Valery Gergiev conducted the opera company in a successful concert version of Verdi's opera at a festival in Israel. The theatre is now restoring the composer's last masterpiece to the St Petersburg stage.

Among those rehearsing for the premiere are Viktor Chernomortsev and Edem Umerov (Sir John Falstaff), Alexander Gergalov, Vasily Gerello and Alexei Safiulin (Ford), Daniil Shtoda, Dmitry Voropaev and Andrei Ilyushnikov (Fenton), Nikolai Gassiev and Andrei Popov (Dr Cajus), Yuri Vorobev, Grigory Karasev and Mikhail Petrenko (Pistola), Andrei Bobrov and Vasily Gorshkov (Bardolfo), Tatiana Pavlovskaya and Oxana Shilova (Mrs Alice Ford), Lyudmila Dudinova, Yulia Smorodina and Olga Trifonova (Nannetta, Ford and Alice's daughter), Mziya Nioradze and Lidiya Bobokhina (Mrs Quickly) and Anna Kiknadze and Elena Sommer (Mrs Meg Page).

Stage Director Kirill Serebrennikov says of the production: "Falstaff is a parable. There is a great deal of sadness in this opera. It is not so very comic. And the story is cruel, so it is impossible to stage Falstaff today without cruelty. None of these sylphs could scare Falstaff if the story is set in our own time, you need something else. And we opted for a solution that is a little cruel and somewhat unusual…"

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