The Saint Petersburg Chamber Choir Urbi et Orbi (Latin “To the City and to the World”) celebrated its first decade. Its artistic director and conductor Oleg Slugin, graduated from The M.I. Glinka Boy Choir School and The N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory, assembled a choir in 2014 mostly of the students of The N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov Musical School for Adults. Since then, the cast has changed, but stayed devoted to the Russian singing tradition, bringing it to the City and to the World.
Today the choir consists of about 20 professional and amateur singers.
The choir has a wide and ever-growing repertoire, including sacred and secular music of Russian composers (Maxim Berezovsky, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Taneyev, Anatoly Lyadov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pavel Chesnokov, Viktor Kalinnikov, Dmitri Shostakovich, Georgy Sviridov, Valery Gavrilin, Yury Falik, Sergei Slonimsky, Dmitri Smirnov etc.) and great European masters (from the Medieval anonymous, Josquin Des Prez, Orlando di Lasso, Claudio Monteverdi, Antonio Lotti, Johann Sebastian Bach to Jan Sibelius, Toivo Kuula, Bohuslav Martinu, Petr Eben, Veljo Tormis), as well as folk songs from all over the world.
The choir regularly performs on different venues of Saint Petersburg and its suburbs, took part in choral festivals, such as “Singing World” (2014, 2015, 2019, 2022), “Nevsky Choral Assemblies” (2015, 2016, 2019), The Grigory Sandler Festival (2015, 2020), XV International Choral Festival “Tallinn 2017”, The Anatoly Lyadov Festival of Arts (Borovichi, 2019) and many others. In June 2016 and October 2017 the choir gave concerts in Znamensky Cathedral of Veliky Novgorod, in April-May 2018 went on a tour in Czech Republic (Podebrady and Prague). In 2019 the choir took part in Alexander Pushkin’s 220th anniversary in Pushkinskiye Gory.
The choir also took part in performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “Mozart and Salieri” (Saint Petersburg Youth Opera Theater, 2014) and “Cavalleria rusticana” by Pietro Mascagni (Music Festival “St Petersburg Palaces”, 2017).