Rock band DDT, participants this week's International Day of Music.
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On June 21, St Petersburg will join the International Day of Music for the first time by staging a massive rock festival. About 20 local acts will celebrate the summer solstice during an 11-hour event called "Radio Fuzz."
Four cities - Paris, Koln, St Petersburg and San Francisco - will be connected by a four-hour satellite link. St Petersburg's part in the festival, which will be televised by the German Deutsche Welle television company, will include footage from the Mariinsky Theater, Glinka Capella, Philharmonic, and Jazz Philharmonic Halls, as well as views of the city during white nights. The second section will be a 30- or 40-minute live transmission from the rock festival.
The festival is the first event co-organized by Rock Fuzz, a local monthly publication, and Radio 1, the Russian-American joint venture which has sponsored Rock Fuzz since last year.
Rock Fuzz and Radio 1 invited a wide range of local perfomers, including DDT, one of Russia's top rock groups.
Other acts will include guitarist Alexander Lyapin, Russia's answer to Jimi Hendrix. Lyapin become famous in the early 1980s as a member of Aquarium, but later formed his own band, called the Alexander Lyapin Experiment.
Nastya -- a band formed by singer Nastya Poleva, who in the 1980s emerged from the flourishing Sverdlovsk music scene -- is one of the main groups from Yekaterinburg.
Another invited group, AVIA, one of the famous exponents of Russian "theater rock," has been inactive for the last few years, but they are planning to reunite for the occasion.
The organizers hope that the event, which is sponsored by North Star, will revive the tradition of the famous Leningrad rock festivals of the 1980s which ceased in 1991. These festivals drew fans from such distant places in the former Soviet Union as Magadan and Kamchatka.
However, the choice of performers and location has already caused criticism in rock circles. Promoter and record producer Andrei Burlaka said the huge exhibition hall, which would host the festival, was not designed for amplified music and would not help to create the right festival atmosphere.
Festival headliners DDT will also perform on Sunday, June 25. The band will celebrate their 15th anniversary with a huge open-air concert at the 40,000-seat Petrovsky Stadium. DDT's slightly altered line-up will be augmented by British saxophone and guest mandolin player Anthony Thistlethwaite.
The concert offically kicks off at 7pm, but DDT will not climb on stage until about 9pm. The well-sponsored band has lavish plans: the performance itself will be a culmination of large-scale celebrations including all sorts of entertainment -- fireworks, balloons and helicopters.
The three-hour concert is part of DDT's anniversary world tour, which takes in the former USSR, Israel, France, Great Britain and the US.