The Traditional Charity Gala Banquet in the Winter Palace
On 26 June 2021, the Traditional Charity Gala Banquet took place in the Winter Palace.
This year it was held in a special format that accorded with the current arrangements for visiting the Hermitage: the compulsory wearing of masks, preliminary testing of guests and museum staff for COVID-19, measuring people’s temperature on entering, a restricted number of participants who also had to move around the museum in small groups keeping strictly to particular routes.
The special programme began with a preview of the Flora project. The director Jacqueline Kornmüller and producer Peter Wolff presented to those attending the charity evening three scenes from a literary mystery play that will have its full premiere in the autumn. While watching the scenes, the groups of invited guests moved exclusively in one direction and maintained safe distancing. The museum staff was on duty in the halls where the performances took place, helping the guests to follow the route and reminding them of the need to keep to public health guidelines.
The donors, partners, sponsors, and friends of the Hermitage visited the new temporary exhibitions “Arts of the Middle Ages. Masterpieces from the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria” and “Alexander Nevsky, Prince and Saint: Imagery and Symbolism”, as well as the latest – “Transfigurations. African masks of the 19th and 20th centuries”, which opened the day before. Since all these exhibitions are housed in large halls in the Winter Palace and Small Hermitage, the guests were able to avoid crossing each other’s paths and to view the exhibits while keeping their distance. The Banquet ended in the Pergamon Hall of the Small Hermitage to the accompaniment of acoustic jazz.
The donations collected in the amount of 20 491 388.6 rubles will go to the State Hermitage's endowment fund, the income from which is used to expand the museum's collections.
The State Hermitage and the Foundation would like to thank the sponsors and patrons of the charity Gala Banquet:
PARTNERS
JTI Russia
DLT
Hennessy Socio-Cultural Foundation
Diaghilev Festival. P.S.
Association wenn es soweit ist
BENEFACTORS
Ingosstrakh
Julia Vizgalina
Soho Jewerly Group
Andrey Demin
Anna Demina
Margarita Demina
Evgeny Satanovsky
Victoria Shamlikashvili
Victoria Sobolevskaya
Here you can find more photos from the Charity Gala Banquet.
