The continuing 2007 White Nights festival has provided a stage for Australian director Paul Curran to stage his first Puccini opera. Having observed Mariinsky productions close at hand during his student days in Finland, it is a delight to say that Curran has absorbed their innovative aesthetics without succumbing to their all too frequent sterility. Updating opera is a relentless vogue, but the phenomenon seems to happen less often to such unavoidably period pieces as Tosca. Set in Napoleonic times with references to Voltaire, the historic battle of Marengo, and the ill fated Roman Republic of 1790s, it may be awkward to move it forward in time. But as Curran correctly points out, Puccini’s music is quintessentially late nineteenth century and part of a larger culture that prefigured the horrors of the twentieth century. So it was not without a certain amount of credulity that I watched the action unfold in a dark corner of Mussolini’s Italy. Rather than a caped and wigged Scarpia, we have a gray clad secret police figure backed up by scary looking thugs in black leather jackets. Our heroine is a glamorous lady of the late 1930s. Even characters who do not appear in opera capture the era. The Marchesa d’Attavanti – the blond who inspires Cavaradossi’s portrait of the Madonna and sets the action in motion by providing succor for her fugitive brother Angelotti – bore more than a slight resemblance to Jean Harlow in her stage-dominating mural. Scarpia is attended by a prim squadron of fascist gals in neat short skirts. Paul Edwards’s sets captured the pomposity of fascist architecture, especially in the massive marble rendition of the Palazzo Farnese in Act II.
Maria Guleghina cancelled her performance to leave St. Petersburg missing one of her dwindling number of appearances. Irina Gordei was an unfortunate substitute despite some reasonably good acting in the murder scene. Popular though she appears to be in Russia, her top voice was heavily taxed in delivering the title role’s best music. As her suitor Akhmed Agadi had flashes of lyrical charm but failed to do much with Cavaradossi’s romantic flare. It was the stentorian baritone Nikolai Putilin whose star rose even higher with an intelligently phrased and powerfully delivered Scarpia. Sergei Skorokhodov delivered dramatic punch with his mean Spoletta. Andrei Spekhov got some laughs as the Sacristan. Valery Gergiev’s conducting might have been a bit too harsh on Puccini’s music, but it worked to great effect in the opera’s opening chords and at the dramatic end of each act.
The decision to keep St. Petersburg’s major operatic stage open this summer has brought a kaleidoscope of new productions, including this one of Leos Janacek’s magnum opus. Unfortunately Dmitrii Bertman’s efforts bored the largely foreign audience – fastidiously assembled for White Nights – into a mixture of slumber and early departure to their undoubtedly overpriced hotels and cruise ships.
Jenufa is a complex work relating an acrimonious inheritance battle, competition among brothers for a young girl’s affection, her cruel disfigurement, the icy murder of her out-of-wedlock infant, and, finally, a touching scene featuring the simultaneous arrest and moral forgiving of the murderess. It may be difficult to escape the gritty realism of late nineteenth century Bohemia in its industrializing central European blandness, but Bertman goes too far in that direction with his overuse of shabby browns and grays to depict characters as well as surroundings. Only the bright blond Finnish tenor Jorma Silvasti, playing Laca, the closest thing this opera has to a hero, gestured toward escaping the visual torpor. His excellent tenor of course helped and was well partnered with the precise yet sonorously beautiful voice of Irina Mataeva. A less well known and far too underpublicized gift to Russian art, Mataeva brought true innocence and rather rare dramatic gravitas to the opera’s title role. The part of her evil tormentor Buryja fell to the consistently unimpressive Larissa Gogolevskaya, whose high pitch wailing made one want to avert his eyes rather than take in her character’s evil music with the relish it usually demands. A fine Mariinsky ensemble cast sang through the lesser parts to Valery Gergiev’s fine conducting. In a different production the evening might yet have been enjoyable.
Sergei Prokofiev’s first opera, based on Dostoevsky’s famous novella, has been given a fresh look in St. Petersburg this season. Georgian director Temur Chkheidze, who also presented the Mariinsky’s last production of 1996 and directed the opera with some critical success at the Metropolitan Opera in 2001, has underdone himself. Instead of the alluring psychology of his earlier work, Chkheidze seems to have regressed. Zinovy Margolin’s disappointing sets gestured toward minimalism, but their threadbare quality left us wondering why an international in-crowd with money to burn would actually want to go to “Roulettenburg” to gamble. Bare walls looked down on a few scattered chairs and sometimes the unfortunate Alexei Ivanovich’s simple bed. The plush resort was reduced to a dull Scandinavian spa. In the gambling scene there was no casino and even no roulette wheel – only a liveried croupier with a stick.
Perhaps having done two major productions of the opera in the recent past has deprived Mr. Chkheidze of fresh insight, but the palpable lack of imagination in this production highlighted the opera’s worst features. Prokofiev scored the vocal parts essentially as a long recitative that relates a complex plot: the impoverished tutor Alexei loves Pauline, the daughter of an obnoxious general who employs him, but the general’s gambling debts to a nasty marquis suggest that the daughter may end up with the Frenchman. Alexei manages to win a huge sum at roulette, which he offers to buy out the general’s debts, only to have his compulsive attachment to gaming destroy the love affair and leave him alone. The dissonant orchestral music jars the audience from one mood to the next, often for no reason expressed in the unfolding action. Perhaps unavoidably for an opera about gambling, the cast is overpopulated by churlish male voices whose characters’ complicated relationships are hard to follow. Combined with the wallpaper paste-dull sets and sparse psychological commentary, these features made the evening drag on and on.
Renowned tenor Vladimir Galuzin owns both the role of Alexei and Russian opera’s other great gambler role, Ghermann in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. He summoned all the oily desperation he could muster for a solid performance. Tatyana Pavlovskaya’s lovely voice delivered Pauline with aplomb, though one felt sorry for her in her battle against a labored score and inconsequential production. Nikolai Gassiev’s nasally tenor did well with the marquis’s obsequiousness. The excellent mezzo Ekaterina Semenchuk was a pleasure to hear in the lesser role of the marquis’s cocotte Blanche. Gennady Bezzubenkov’s girth and vocal power made him every inch the Russian general in a spot. Valery Gergiev navigated the vagaries of Prokofiev’s score with more precision than usual. It would be hard to imagine a better performance of this far from perfect opera despite the far from perfect production.
– Paul du Quenoy
Russia’s imperial capital has reached a minor milestone with its fifteenth international Stars of the White Nights Festival and it is celebrating with an unprecedented number of new productions and foreign artists. Announcements that the venerable Mariinsky would be closed during the construction of a new theater turned out to be mistaken. It and the city’s other arts venues are unbroken in their artistic stride.
It is perhaps ironic that one of this year’s premiere productions presents a work that mocks the traditions and routines of grand opera as they stood in the first decades of the last century. Sergei Prokofiev’s second mature opera adapted the eponymous play by the eighteenth-century Venetian satirist Carlo Gozzi to attempt for music what Gozzi attempted with some degree of success for drama: to illustrate the ridiculousness of prevailing stage conventions. Based on a scenario by the enfant terrible of Russian theater Vsevolod Meyerhold, who shared in pre-revolutionary Petersburg’s vogue for Italian masks, Prokofiev’s opera follows a commedia dell’arte fantasy. A melancholic prince languishes near death because of his inability to laugh. An entertainment accidentally draws out the sorely needed emotion, only to result in a curse from Fata Morgana, who, invoked by the prince’s enemies, condemns him to fall in love with three oranges. With the help of Harlequin, he finds the oranges in the desert, fools their guardian (a ridiculous female character played by a basso), and releases three princesses held within them. He promises to make one of the princesses his bride, but manages to lose her after Fata Morgana tranforms her into a rat. Finally all is resolved, the princess is restored, the enemies descend to hell, and happiness reigns.
As an artifact of Russian modernist stagecraft, the production holds up well. We might ask how relevant it is to the current state of theater, though, since very few people in the audience seemed to realize its philosophical purpose or care if they did. Petersburg’s rather sophisticated audience greeted it as more of a children’s opera. This was, however, probably not producer Alain Maratrat’s intention. He has followed on his fourth-wall shattering Mariinsky production of Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Rheims with a staging that places a fair amount of the cast among the audience, with entrances from the hall, ensemble singing from the Tsar’s Box, and a chorus clad in the azure blue colors of the theater’s upholstery. Meyerhold would have been proud, and the homage to early twentieth-century Russian modernism did not fall flat. The Mariinsky assembled a fine young cast largely drawn from its promising Academy of Young Singers, perhaps the best in the world for Prokofiev’s music today. Tenor Andrei Iliushnikov sang through the prince’s difficult dissonant music with clarion brilliance. Among the rest of the ensemble, veteran bass Gennady Bezzubenkov leant a stentorian demeanor to the role of the King. Natalia Evstaveva was a delightful Fata Morgana and Anastasiia Kalagina a delightful princess. Tugan Sokhiev conducted with a confidence that reminded one of his mentor and fellow Osset Valery Gergiev, who will be heard in many performances this summer. – Paul du Quenoy
Paul du Quenoy, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History
The American University in Cairo
