Russia's Bolshoi may miss 2008 overhaul deadline

Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre may not be able to reopen next year as planned because its renovation has been mired in unexpected problems and expense, the state agency paying for the works said yesterday.

In July 2005 the Bolshoi, one of the world's leading opera and ballet companies, closed for restoration, its façade tarnished and walls and columns pitted by decades of neglect.

"There may be a change in the date of the end of the reconstruction," Natalia Uvarova, a spokeswoman for Russia's Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency, said.

Ms Uvarova said the building was still being examined and renovators were expected to provide a more precise completion date by the end of this month.

"When the reconstruction of the Bolshoi started it turned out that, some underground work came up, some places were damaged by fungal rot, which required additional expense," she said.

"Such difficulties, such things that could not be foreseen kept coming up at different stages of the reconstruction."

At the weekend, Russian media quoted the Bolshoi's director general Anatoly Iksanov as saying the end of the renovation had been delayed by at least a year. Earlier this month, he said he hoped it would reopen between next month and November next year.

Ms Uvarova declined to confirm the new 2009 estimate, saying all the examination work had to be completed before the deadline could be changed. Mr Iksanov was not available for comment.

Yesterday, a billboard still stood outside the Bolshoi Theatre saying the reconstruction was due to be completed in the first quarter of next year.

Founded by a decree of Empress Catherine the Great in 1776, the Bolshoi acquired the building in 1825 after fire gutted the original home, the Petrovka Theatre, in 1805. The state has allotted $585 million for its renovation.

Workers have stabilised the foundations with hundreds of piles and reinforced its walls and columns with steel bars.

Modern stage technology will be installed and backstage areas will be repaired as well. Russian tsars and Soviet leaders alike loved to visit the Bolshoi and invited important foreign guests to the theatre.

In 1944 Soviet leader Josef Stalin took British Prime Minister Winston Churchill there. In 2002 an unexploded World War II bomb was found under one of the Bolshoi's entrances.