Music Hall

In Alexandrovsky Park, not far from the Peter and Paul Fortress, stands the building where, for nearly a century, one of Russia's oldest theatres of variety song and music has performed — the Leningrad, later St Petersburg, Music Hall. The theatre grew out of the genre of light variety revue with songs, dance and jazz, and over time became a venue for musicals, opera and concerts. The building itself, where it is housed, is a monument to early twentieth-century engineering.

The theatre's founding date is considered to be 5 December 1928, when the director David Gutman presented the first programme, "Wonders of the Twentieth Century, or the Last Ferryman", in the Opera Hall of the People's House. The troupe's fame grew through its collaboration with the composer Isaac Dunaevsky, who from 1929 headed the company's musical department as conductor, and with Leonid Utyosov's jazz orchestra; the singer Klavdiya Shulzhenko, the director Nikolai Petrov, and the artist Nikolai Akimov also performed here. In 1931 the show "Conditionally Killed" was staged here, with music by Dmitri Shostakovich. In 1937 the Moscow and Leningrad music halls were closed as vehicles of "bourgeois art".

The building traces its history to a pavilion with a cast-iron frame and glass dome, presented by the architect Alexander Pomerantsev at an exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. At the request of Prince Alexander of Oldenburg, the structure was transported to St Petersburg, and in 1899–1901 the architect Georgy Lutsedarsky built the People's House on its basis; in 1910–1912 he also added the spacious Opera Hall, seating fifteen hundred spectators. After a fire destroyed part of the buildings in the early 1930s, the surviving structures were repeatedly rebuilt for new purposes.

The Music Hall was revived in 1966 under the direction of Ilya Rakhlin, but for almost two decades the troupe staged its premieres at the Lensoviet Palace of Culture. The building of the former Opera Hall, which had at various times housed a branch of the Kirov Theatre, the Musical Comedy Theatre, the "Velikan" cinema and a planetarium, was handed over to the theatre in the late 1970s, but the reconstruction dragged on, and the renovated hall received its first audience only in 1988. In 1987 a children's studio was opened at the theatre, and it continues to operate today.

The company was led over the years by Lev Rakhlin, Alexander Platunov and Yevgeny Kulikov; since 2013 the artistic director has been the conductor Fabio Mastrangelo. Under him, the musicals "The Master and Margarita" and "The Great Gatsby" were staged, along with the opera buffa "Don Pasquale", and the theatre became a co-organiser of the "Opera for All" festival, offering free open-air performances. In 2016 the company was given the building of a former Anglican church on the English Embankment for use as a concert hall, and from March 2023 the main building has been closed for renovation, with the theatre now bearing a new name — the F. I. Chaliapin Musical Theatre.

Despite the change of name, the building in Alexandrovsky Park remains the very hall where Utyosov's jazz once played in the late 1920s, and where musicals and opera productions are staged today. The theatre's history — from the pre-war variety revue to a modern repertory musical theatre — reflects nearly a century of evolution in popular musical entertainment in the city.