The 2012 Festival season staged eleven concerts featuring world-class orchestras: the Royal Philharmonic, the Saint-Petersburg Philharmonic as well as the Moscow Virtuosi, directed respectively by Charles Dutoit, Yuri Temirkanov and Vladimir Spivakov. Five hundred and forty musicians, soloists and conductors converged from far and wide. Concerts, master classes and vocal workshops were all held at the spacious, acoustically impeccable halls of St. Bernadette’s Church, the Castle of the Dukes of Savoy, the Europe Hall of the Imperial Hotel and at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Total audience capacity at these venues is 9,000. Four Festival concerts were totally sold out several weeks before the opening and the pricing policy of the Festival, adopted at the request of The AVC Charity Foundation, kept ticket prices at between €5 and €60.