Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theatre

Is the Yekaterinburg opera house worth it?

Yes, if you have an evening free. Ural Opera Ballet is one of the strongest companies outside Moscow and St Petersburg, its ballet troupe in particular. Since 2011 it has mixed the classics with work by Hans van Manen, Paul Lightfoot and Sol León — the first Russian company to dance them — and revivals of Petipa’s Paquita.

The building is a pleasure too: a white neo-Baroque house from 1912 with a horseshoe auditorium, boxes and gilded tiers, sometimes nicknamed the White Swan. Tickets cost a fraction of what you pay at the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky, and even the cheap seats get you inside the hall.

When it’s not worth it: if your only free slot is daytime on a weekday. There’s no visitor entry without a show and no published building tours, so in daylight you just see the facade — nice for a photo, five minutes at most.

How to buy tickets as a foreign visitor

The safest places are the theatre’s own website and its box office. The theatre also lists Kassir.ru and Yandex Afisha as official sellers. Ignore lookalike sites and touts at the door: around New Year, resold Nutcracker seats go for several times face value, and each barcode scans only once.

Online, there’s no reservation: you pay within 20 minutes or the seats return to sale. The e-ticket arrives as a PDF by email and is scanned from your phone. The site works in Russian, and online sales close two hours before curtain.

In person, the box office is at entrance No. 10, to the right of the main doors on the Krasnoarmeyskaya Street side, open daily 10:00–20:00 (the contacts page mentions a break from 14:00 to 15:00). Bring your passport if you might need a refund. Concessions for pensioners and some other groups are for Russian document holders only.

Ticket prices and the best seats

Prices depend on the show, the day and the row. A daytime children’s opera starts at about 300 ₽, a weekday opera evening is far cheaper than a weekend ballet premiere, and for the December Nutcracker local news site E1.ru reports 5,000–20,000 ₽. The seat map on each show page shows the exact price when you hover over a seat.

The hall has a stalls level (parterre), a dress circle (beletazh), an upper tier (yarus) and a gallery, with boxes at the sides. For ballet, the centre of the dress circle or the middle of the stalls from row 7 shows the whole corps de ballet. For opera, the central stalls sound best.

The gallery is the budget way in — fine for a first visit, but the stage is small from up there, so bring binoculars. The theatre warns that some side seats have a restricted view; check the seat map before you pay.

What’s on: operas, ballets and seasonal favourites

• Classical ballet — Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Le Corsaire, Paquita and The Nutcracker, the last mostly in late December.
• New ballet — pieces by the company’s choreographers and European modern repertoire you won’t easily find elsewhere in Russia.
• Opera classics — Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, Rigoletto, Carmen and Lucia di Lammermoor.
• Rare operas — Weinberg’s The Passenger, about an Auschwitz guard, and Glass’s Satyagraha were first staged in Russia here.
• Family shows — The Snow Queen, Thumbelina and the opera Morozko, usually as 11:00 matinees.
• The Christmas Concert — a December gala of arias and ballet numbers, popular with locals.

History of the building

The theatre was built on the site of a wooden circus to a competition design by Vladimir Semyonov, a St Petersburg engineer who later became Moscow’s chief architect. It opened in 1912 with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, in a horseshoe hall for about 1,200 people.

Look up at the facade: a wide balcony on brackets, arched windows, ornate lamps and, above the centre, a group of three Muses with the date 1912. The style is eclectic neo-Baroque with a nod to Vienna.

The ballet company gave its first performance in 1914. According to the theatre, stars such as the tenors Sergei Lemeshev and Ivan Kozlovsky began their careers here. Its modern revival came in the 2010s with national Golden Mask awards, and in 2018 it rebranded as Ural Opera Ballet.

Dress code and house rules

There’s no formal dress code. Locals dress neatly, and a bit smarter for premieres and the New Year shows; jeans with a clean shirt are fine, sportswear and flip-flops look out of place.

Coats go to the cloakroom in the basement, which gets busy after the show. Food, drinks and bouquets can’t go into the hall — flowers for the dancers are handed to an usher. Filming and photographing the performance is not allowed.

After the third bell nobody is let into the stalls; latecomers wait for a pause and move to their seats at the interval. Arrive half an hour early to see the hall before the lights go down.

Opera house, Yeltsin Center or Vysotsky: how to spend an evening

With one evening in Yekaterinburg, YesGo would spend it at a ballet here — it’s the best night out the city has. See the Yeltsin Center by day, and catch the view from the Vysotsky before the show rather than after, when the deck may already be closing.

Nearby and on your route

41

Vysotsky Skyscraper

Yekaterinburg, Russia

45 min · 600 ₽, children 5–12 400 ₽ · 6 min walk

Yes — add to my route: Vysotsky Skyscraper

39

Sevastyanov House

Yekaterinburg, Russia

45 min · Free, outside only · 11 min walk

Yes — add to my route: Sevastyanov House

55

Church on the Blood

Yekaterinburg, Russia

45 min · Free entry to the church · 13 min walk

Yes — add to my route: Church on the Blood

44

Plotinka Dam

Yekaterinburg, Russia

45 min · Free · 14 min walk

Yes — add to my route: Plotinka Dam

How to do it right

• Book the December Nutcracker in September or October — by December only the priciest seats are left.
• A weekday opera from the gallery is the cheapest way to see the hall.
• No Russian card? Buy at the box office in person on your first day in town, with cash in roubles.
• Take a matinee at 11:00 if you’re travelling with children under six, and sit near an aisle.
• Buy at least 10 days ahead if plans might change — that’s the only window for a full refund.
• Photograph the facade after dark from across Lenin Avenue, when the Muses are lit.
• After an evening show, the lit-up Plotinka is a 12-minute walk west.

Questions