Opera "Eugene Onegin" by Chinese actors staged in St. Petersburg

ST. PETERSBURG, Feb. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese students from a conservatory in Russia's St. Petersburg on Thursday performed the classical opera "Eugene Onegin" composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

According to the TASS news agency, the Chinese actors came from the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory. Maria Ludko, the conservatory's dean of vocal and directing department and an honored artist in Russia, came up with the idea of starring Chinese students. Alexei Stepanyuk, head of the conservatory's department of opera training, acted as director. Stepanyuk had previously staged this work in Beijing.

This is the first Russian-Chinese production for the conservatory. "Eugene Onegin" was chosen for the reason that the opera entered the repertoire of the Opera Studio of the Leningrad Conservatory in 1929, and has been staged annually since then.

St. Petersburg is the second largest city in Russia, formerly named Leningrad.