Bravo! Music at reopened Kyiv opera replaces noise of Russian artillery

Now, less than three months later and with fierce battles still raging in the eastern part of the country, the opera is back, although with some changes. Performances will only take place on weekend afternoons, a maximum of 300 tickets are sold, and the audience has to be ready to move quickly to the basement cloakrooms if air-raid sirens sound during a performance.

Only the stalls were full, with the four tiers of gilded balconies off-limits to ensure an evacuation could take place more quickly if needed.

Many of the opera troupe are still abroad, and some in the orchestra are fighting on the frontline or serving in the territorial defence forces.

Oleksii Potiomkin, the principal dancer of the ballet, has joined up and is serving in the army, posting daily updates on Instagram.

But enough artists and technical staff are back at work for the company to put on full-scale opera stagings.

Soprano Olha Fomichova, who sang the lead role of Rosina on Saturday, struggled to hold back tears as she spoke of her emotions before going on stage.

Fomichova mostly stayed in Kyiv during the invasion but sent her son to safety in Germany. She saw him recently when she travelled there to take part in a charity gala to help Ukraine, and both the family reunion and the concert were emotional, she said.

Over the past three months, the soloists have kept in touch in a chat group on Viber, swapping stories about how the war was going for them, said Natalia Nykolaishyn, a soprano who has been at the theatre for 20 years.

Prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, attending a Rimsky-Korsakov opera with Tsar Nicholas II, was shot dead during the interval while standing in the front row of the stalls.

The first was between the end of the Nazi occupation and the return of the evacuated Soviet troupe. The second was due to Covid. Otherwise, performances continued even as regimes, empires and ideological slants changed.

Now, with the Russian invasion, the theatre plans to remove all of its Russian repertoire, at least for the time being.