World-renowned conductor Valery Gergiev and soloists of the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra, together with the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra will perform a charity concert in support of the initiative to build a new acoustic musical complex in Bulgaria. The project is designed to have the potential of turning into a temple of spirit and culture for the coming generations of young people and to set the city of Sofia next to the major cultural centres of the world.

The concert will take place on 10 September at 8.30pm in Bulgaria Hall. The programme includes works by Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky. The event will be broadcast live on a video wall in front of the Ivan Vazov National Theatre in order to be accessible to all citizens and guests of the city.

Being one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Times Magazine, Valery Gergiev is a long-standing artistic director and general director of the Mariinsky Theatre. A prominent representative of the St Petersburg School of Conducting, he is a student of the legendary professor Ilya Musin. As a student at the Leningrad Conservatory, the young conductor won the Herbert von Karajan Competition in Berlin and the All-Union Conductors Competition in Moscow, after which he was invited to the Mariinsky Theatre as an assistant to the principal conductor. His conducting debut was on 12 January 1978 with the opera War and Peace by Sergei Prokofiev. In 1988, he was invited for the position of music director of the theatre, and since 1996 he has been its artistic director and general director.

After his debuts in 1991 at the Bavarian State Opera, in 1993 at Covent Garden and in 1994 at the Metropolitan Opera, Valery Gergiev continues his successful performances in the largest opera houses in the world. Since 1997, he has been managing the World Orchestra for Peace, as well as conducting philharmonic orchestras in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, San Francisco, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, etc. He has been the principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra (1995-2008) and the London Symphony Orchestra (2007-2015). Since the autumn of 2015, he has been conducting the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, and since 2018 - the orchestra of the Verbier Music Festiva/Europost