Baltimore's arts groups soon will face a very public test of whether they, and the city's business community, can reach what they say is their goal - to work together.

This week, Baltimore was one of seven cities in the United States that officially announced plans to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg, Russia's former imperial capital and one of the great artistic and cultural centers of the world.

Baltimore's 18-day festival, Vivat! St. Petersburg, will be the largest of the seven (with a publicity and organizational budget of about $900,000), the only one operating citywide and the first to open, on Feb. 13. The festival also is the first major collaboration between the city's arts groups and hospitality industry, which will be offering lodging and ticket packages to out-of-town visitors.

"This is an unprecedented undertaking," said John Gidwitz, president of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. "To have all the large arts organizations and 50 smaller ones putting on exhibits and performances with a common theme over a three-week period is frankly miraculous, and we're very excited about it."

Not only is Baltimore's celebration the largest in the country, Gidwitz said, it has more cultural offerings than the 300th anniversary celebration being planned by St. Petersburg itself.

Part of that scale is a result of the efforts of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association, which has been involved in the planning process from the start.

"The festival serves a dual purpose," says Matt Pegg, BACVA's visitor information and sales manager. "It's great for the arts, and it will really help us promote the city as an arts and cultural destination during what normally is a down time for us."

Other U.S. cities planning similar anniversary festivities are New York; Washington; Atlanta; New Haven, Conn.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and New Brunswick, N.J. (As part of the nationwide launch this week, Saks Fifth Avenue in New York unveiled its St. Petersburg-themed holiday windows. )

"We were at the luncheon in New York with the Russian consul general, and about everyone agreed that the largest, most important St. Petersburg festival anywhere in the world is going to be in Baltimore," Gidwitz said.

If Baltimore is awakening to the lucrative potential of festivals, that realization is coming none too soon.

Last year, there were 445 fine arts festivals in the United States, according to Jim Shanklin, the founder of Festivals.com, a Web site that helps Internet users locate festivals worldwide. (That number includes Artscape, Baltimore's free, three-day celebration of the visual arts that has been held each summer for the past 21 years.) These festivals were attended by more than 24.5 million people who spent $736 million - a figure that doesn't include lodging or art purchases.

A money-maker

Although the fine arts festivals represent just 18 percent of the celebrations devoted to the fine arts and crafts, they accounted for 37 percent of the total dollars those celebrations generated.

"Fine arts and visual arts festivals have a disproportionately large economic impact when compared to some other types of festivals," Shanklin said. "Part of the purpose of an arts festival is to look at and buy art, or to purchase a ticket so you can attend a performance."

For instance, the Sausalito Arts Festival, which began in 1952, has been so profitable that, in the past five years, it gave away nearly $1 million, according to the California festival's Web site. That includes $200,000 to the city of Sausalito, $100,000 to local social service groups and $500,000 to its chamber of commerce to sponsor, among other things, debates among political candidates.

The arts have been used successfully to attract tourists to other cities. In 1996, a Cezanne show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art drew nearly 778,000 visitors, who spent $122.6 million. The Humana Festival/Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky., now in its 25th year, is an important showcase for new American plays and draws about 200,000 visitors annually. The Spoleto Festival in South Carolina, which has been importing top performing arts groups to Charleston since 1977, has a yearly attendance of about 100,000.

But the BSO's Gidwitz points out that few festivals nationwide coordinate performances and exhibits across different types of performing groups and museums.

"Of all the arts festivals going on in the country, this is the only one showing this amount of coordination," he said. "The way arts groups are organized doesn't lead to collaborative efforts, so you don't see it happening in very many places at all."

Festival highlights

With Vivat, Baltimore is doing its best to make up for lost time.

Some festival highlights will include: a Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit featuring the set and costume designs of the Ballets Russes; a Walters Art Museum show of Faberge miniature animals; a Baltimore Opera Company production of Lady Macbeth of Mzensk; and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concerts showcasing such Russian composing giants as Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.

The Maryland Film Festival also is trying to acquire a director's cut of Sergei Eisenstein's October, which includes scenes that the acclaimed filmmaker was forced by Stalin to cut and which never have been shown in the United States.

Homegrown talent

Unlike the other six St. Petersburg festivals nationwide, Baltimore's exclusively showcases homegrown talent. The organizers' intent is to strut the city's stuff to the world. "We think this will make Baltimore a cultural destination," says Joan Davidson, Vivat's artistic director.

As well as its obvious advantages, that approach has drawbacks:

Baltimore has no major professional dance company, so there is a relative paucity of ballet-related activities in Vivat, although St. Petersburg made an immense contribution to dance. And two of that city's brightest jewels - the Mariinski (formerly Kirov) Ballet and Eifman Ballet - are touring the nation as part of other St. Petersburg anniversary celebrations.

The national model most similar to Vivat is perhaps the International Arts Festival in Milwaukee. Since its 1998 debut, that event has grown from a half-dozen groups performing over three weeks to between three dozen and five dozen organizations (depending on the year) spread out over six weeks.

"In particular, the smaller groups benefit. They couldn't afford to pay for the publicity they get from being part of this venture," says Therese Fennelly, development director of Milwaukee's Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, which operates the festival.

Ethnic themes

As in Baltimore, the Milwaukee festival is funded entirely by private money and has an ethnic theme. There is no imported talent. And as in Baltimore, the Milwaukee festival was created to develop business downtown during February, a time of year when people tend to stay indoors and when restaurants and hotels are partly empty. (Eighty-five percent of all arts festivals take place in the warmer months.)

There are differences, however. In Milwaukee, a trolley operating year-round ferries visitors between venues; Baltimore doesn't have a similar shuttle system. And the Milwaukee festival is aimed primarily at residents.

"Having an ethnic base of support in the city makes planning the festival so much easier," Fennelly said. "It's easier to raise money, attract audiences, get the arts groups aboard. Everything."

In contrast, Baltimore hopes to attract tourists.

So Vivat's organizers didn't hesitate to adopt a Russian theme, although just 0.8 percent of Baltimore residents are of Russian descent, according to 2000 census data. There are thriving Russian populations outside Philadelphia and in other municipalities within a short drive of Baltimore that the city hopes to draw, Davidson said.

For the moment, Baltimore's festival is a one-time event. While organizers hope to repeat the Vivat experience (featuring a different ethnic group), they estimate it will take at least three years to organize its successor.

One-time vs. annual

Milwaukee's Fennelly thinks it's difficult for a festival to catch on if it's not an annual event.

"You have to grow it," she said. "The first year, you learn from your mistakes. Then you can get some momentum going and make it more interesting. Soon, you have an image branded."

But, Vivat organizers say, it would be shortsighted to focus on the few details still to be worked out when the festival has the potential to do so much good for the arts and for Baltimore's image.

"This gets us above the noise of the everyday, and connects us to an international identity," says Gary Vikan, director of the Walters. "It could raise the whole profile of the city."

Festival details

What: Vivat! St. Petersburg

When: Feb. 13-March 2, 2003

Information: Call 1-877-225-8466 or visit www.vivatfest.com root