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Metro Celebrates Birthday With Underground Concert

The Moscow metro celebrated its birthday with a nighttime concert featuring choral music, contemporary hits and beat boxing at the Kropotkinskaya metro station.

A choir began singing while the metro was still in operation, the music occasionally drowned out by the roar of approaching metro trains, Ridus.ru reported.

Performances included a  from the Russian State University for the Humanities led by Boris Tarakanov, the vocal group Broadway, international competition winners Irina Sakne and Natalia Kirillova and People's Artist of the Soviet Union Alexander Pyatkov.

This was the third nighttime birthday celebration for the metro system marked with an underground concert, though the first time it has not coincided with the annual Night of the Museums event held by the city, Ridus.ru said.

The Moscow metro first opened May 15, 1935 with 13 stations connecting Sokolniki and Park Kultury, including a branch from Okhotny Ryad to Smolenskaya.

Plans were recently announced to add 70 stations and 150 km of track to the metro system by 2020, part of an aggressive push by the city to develop transportation infrastructure. The new plans would increase the number of stations to 252 and the length of the track to 451 kilometers.

This is what the first metro map looked like.

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