Saydashev State Grand Concert Hall

The Salikh Saydashev State Grand Concert Hall is Kazan’s main concert venue, located on Freedom Square next to the historic opera theatre building. The two-storey building combines a grand hall and a chamber hall along with rehearsal and service rooms. World-class orchestras, soloists and conductors perform here, and the hall has long served as the venue for the republic’s most important cultural and public events.

The building opened on 8 December 1967 as the assembly hall of the Kazan Conservatory, designed by architect M. Kh. Agishev; for its distinctive glazed façade, residents nicknamed it the “glass box.” By the early 1990s the nearly thirty-year-old building was in need of major renovation, and in 1992 a competition was announced for a new design. It was won by the VELP studio, with a project by architects Vitaly Loginov and Yevgeny Prokofyev: in effect, the hall was rebuilt from the ground up, with only part of the original load-bearing structure retained. The work took about seven hundred days and was completed in June 1996.

As a result of the rebuild, the capacity of the main hall grew from six hundred to seven hundred seats, four boxes were added, and the ceiling was raised by almost four metres to improve the room’s acoustics. In 1997 a large organ built by the Dutch firm Flentrop, with fifty-nine stops, was installed in the hall — one of the few concert organs of this class in the Volga region. Separate from the main hall, a seventy-seat chamber hall hosts more intimate programmes and rehearsals.

On 15 December 2000, by decree of Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaymiev, the hall was named after Salikh Saydashev, the founder of professional Tatar music; that same year the architects of the renovation received Russia’s State Prize for their interior design. The renovated hall opened with the programme of the “New Wanderers” festival, and later it began regularly hosting the international “Pianoforum” festival and the International Choral Assembly, while the republic’s symphony orchestra opens its concert seasons here.

Over the years this stage has hosted Vladimir Spivakov’s ensemble “The Moscow Virtuosi,” a Mariinsky Theatre company conducted by Valery Gergiev, and a jazz band led by Oleg Lundstrem; pianist Denis Matsuev, saxophonist Igor Butman, and opera singers Yelena Obraztsova and Lyubov Kazarnovskaya have all given concerts here. Since 2011 the hall has hosted the Rachmaninoff music forum “White Lilac,” and since the autumn of that same year, the contemporary music festival “Concordia,” named in honour of Sofia Gubaidulina and organised with the composer’s personal involvement.

Today the hall remains not only a concert venue but also a socially significant site: it has hosted the inaugurations of the republic’s president and the World Congress of Tatars. For the people of Kazan, the building on Freedom Square has long since evolved from a plain 1960s “glass box” into one of the Volga region’s leading cultural stages, combining academic tradition, contemporary festivals and a constantly refreshed programme of world-class events.