Over the four years immediately preceding the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, the Culture Ministry has taken it upon itself to provide the host city of Sochi with a so-called "Cultural Olympics."

Grandiose is the best one-word description I can come up with for the Bolshoi Theater's partly new production of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet "Sleeping Beauty" that premiered in mid-November at the theater's newly reopened Main Stage.

The summer before last came the surprising announcement that Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato, a major driving force in contemporary ballet, had agreed to take on the duties of ballet artistic director at St. Petersburg's Mikhailovsky Theater, thereby becoming the first foreigner to hold such a post in Russia since the retirement a century ago of the Mariinsky Theater's legendary French-born Marius Petipa.

For the eighth year in a row, the end of the January holidays will bring with it the beginning of Novaya Opera's Epiphany Week festival, honoring the memory of the theater's revered founder, Yevgeny Kolobov, and running, as always, beyond the span of a mere seven days.

The Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater has enjoyed remarkable success over the past three years in adding to its ballet repertoire.

Every appearance in Moscow by Mariinsky Theater prima ballerina Diana Vishneva is bound to be an event of great allure to the city's ballet-going public. And the new program she brings to the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater this week, titled "Diana Vishneva: Dialogues," should prove no exception.

Russian musicians, Russian artistic direction and Russian money have combined forces for the past two Augusts to present a lavish festival of classical music in the French Alpine resort town of Annecy.

The Culture Ministry has announced the appointment of Vladimir Jurowski as chief conductor of the Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra. Jurowski, 39, currently serves in the same capacity with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Pokrovsky Chamber Musical Theater's 40th season got off to lively and highly entertaining start last month when it added yet another out-of-way opera to its already adventurous repertoire.

This season, after an interval of four years, the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater has revived its long-standing festival known as DanceInversion, bringing a feast of superb companies and dancers to provide nourishment to what seems a steadily increasing audience in Moscow for contemporary dance.

For the third September in a row, the Moscow concert season has gotten under way with the Large Festival of the Russian National Orchestra, which began Thursday and runs until Sept. 18. Like its predecessors, this year's festival is an eclectic mixture, combining concerts by Moscow's finest symphony orchestra with vocal recitals, jazz and a touch of ballet.

In the final days of July, a group of distinguished Russian musicians gathered in a remote corner of northern Azerbaijan to take part in the principal and final segment of the two-week-long 3rd International Gabala Music Festival.

World-renowned tenor Placido Domingo came to Moscow in mid-July, bringing with him Operalia, an annual competition for young opera singers that he founded in 1993 and has been the driving force behind ever since.

The 14th International Tchaikovsky Competition reached its conclusion over the weekend with concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg featuring 14 of its 19 prize-winning pianists, violinists, cellists and vocalists.

One of the world's most celebrated modern dance troupes, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, opens a six-performance run Tuesday at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater, bringing with it two programs centered around and dedicated to "Revelations," a work choreographed by company founder Alvin Ailey half a century ago.

Culture doesn't automatically spring to mind when you think of Sochi these days. But along with its massive preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games and its plans for building a Formula One track, the Black Sea resort city is also playing host to a far-reaching program of events dubbed the "Cultural Olympics."

This season, the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater has added to its already impressive repertoire of contemporary ballet three more superior works by present-day masters of the choreographic art.

For the 10th year in a row, Easter celebrations on Sunday are set to include the opening of the Moscow Easter Festival, with bell ringing in the mid-afternoon at the Christ the Savior Cathedral and an evening concert at Tchaikovsky Hall by the orchestra of St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater under the baton of festival artistic director Valery Gergiev.

The Golden Mask Festival of 2011 comes to end this evening at Gostinny Dvor with the awarding of prizes for what the festival's juries consider the best in Russian dramatic, musical and puppet theater from the season of 2009-10.

This Sunday, the 84th anniversary of the birth of the great cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, marks the beginning of the 2nd International Mstislav Rostropovich Festival in Moscow.

After more than a week of turmoil surrounding leadership of its renowned ballet troupe, the Bolshoi Theater announced the appointment of former Bolshoi premier danseur Sergei Filin as its new ballet artistic director.

Following last season's mostly dubious parade of ballet revivals and reconstructions and the disastrous "Creation 2010 …" by French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, the Bolshoi Theater finally came up late last December with a new evening of ballet worth cheering about — a triple bill, titled "Ballets of the 20th Century."

In the last days of January, the Bolshoi Theater brought to its stage the Moscow premiere of “Reflections,” an evening of mostly new ballets featuring seven distinguished female graduates of the theater’s training school, the Moscow Choreographic Academy.

The current opera season got off to an unusually bad start in the months leading up to the end of 2010. The Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater brought to the stage Giuseppe Verdi’s “La forza del destino” and the Pokrovsky Chamber Musical Theater offered a reconstruction of its 1978 staging of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”

Novaya Opera is set once again to relieve the post-holiday gloom with its seventh annual Epiphany Week festival, which in fact runs not for a week, but for slightly more than two weeks. The program put together for the festival looks to be one of unusual interest.

With the Bolshoi’s ballet company largely caught in the doldrums since the departure of artistic director Alexei Ratmansky, the real action on the Moscow ballet scene is likelier to be found at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni,” once described by French composer Charles Gounod as “a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection,” returned to the Bolshoi Theater at the end of October in its first new production there since 1950.

The Prokofiev Hall of the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture will resound Thursday with the blare of trumpets and the beat of drums, all of them nearly 200 years old, in the first of a series of concerts by members of the Central Concert Orchestra of the Russian Navy.

The current Year of France in Russia is likely to reach its musical high point Friday evening, when France’s most distinguished early music ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, makes its Russian debut at Tchaikovsky Hall.

The Bolshoi Theater’s 235th season got off to a highly unusual start with the world premiere of a new ballet by the celebrated French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, co-produced by the Bolshoi and the choreographer’s own Ballet Preljocaj.