The Bolshoi was nominated for Leonid Desyatnikov's new Rosenthal's Children, which was accused of being "pornographic" and prompted an investigation by the Russian State Duma when it opened last year, as well as a Robert Wilson production of Madama Butterfly.

The Mariinsky was nominated for Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims and a modern-dress staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

Other opera nominations went to Moscow's Helicon Opera for Fallen From the Sky, a newly assembled music-theater work based on Prokofiev's The Story of a Real Man and Alexander Nevsky; St. Petersburg Opera's production of Verdi's La traviata; the Perm Theater for stagings of Bizet's Carmen and Stravinsky's Le Rossignol; and the Ufa Theater for Mozart's Die Zauberfl‹te.

Ballet nominations went to Mariinsky for two shorts works by William Forsythe and David Dawson; the Bolshoi for Shostakovich's Bolt, staged by director Alexei Ratmansky, and John Neumeier's version of A Midsummer Night's Drean; the Karasnoyarsk Theater for Romeo and Juliet, and the Boris Eifman Ballet Theater for its new Anna Karenina.