St. Petersburg Music Guide: Gould "One of Canada's Greatest Gifts to the World"
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 07:30AM By Penny Johnson, Contributing Author
Fifty-three years have passed since Glenn Gould gave his historic series of concerts in the former Soviet Union cities of Moscow and Leningrad. The first North American pianist to touch ground there since the death of Stalin in 1953, Gould's two week tour in early May 1957 is listed on a new website called St. Petersburg Music Guide as one of several significant musical events in the history of the city. This new website chronicles important musical events and figures that helped shape the cultural development of a city which has survived three name changes, a revolution, two world wars, one million victims to the Nazi regime and extreme oppression under communist rule.
Founded by Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) in 1703, St. Petersburg has always been and will remain "one of the musical capitals of the world," according to pianist and conductor, Vladimir Ashkenazy. Few cities can boast the level of artistic splendor that has defined St. Petersburg throughout its more than three hundred year existence. Home to the birth of Russian ballet, the Hermitage Theatre, the St. Petersburg Conservatory (founded in 1862 by Alexander II), the Mariinsky Theatre, the Russian Museum and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, music has remained at the heart of the city and its audiences are amongst the most astute and intelligent in the world. As Kevin Bazzana writes in Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, audiences "tended to be musically perceptive, with real devotion and love for music, and represented a cross-section of the population, not just cognoscenti."
Penny Johnson,
St. Petersburg 






