Alevtina Ioffe / Ocene

The Mikhailovsky Theater hosted the first premiere of the season — the opera The Magic Flute staged, set and costumed by Pet Halmen. Conductor of the Mariinsky Theater Gavriel Heine was at the podium. The performance became a joint project of the Mikhailovsky Theater and the Lausanne Opera. The director died four years ago, and the St. Petersburg production was handled by Eric Vigier, director of the Lausanne Opera. If such a performance had appeared a couple of years earlier, it might not have seemed very relevant. And today, the strict, pure, black-and-white aesthetics, in which the production, stylizing the theater of the Mozart era, is solved, has turned out to be a balm for the soul, tormented by daily reports from the battlefields or terrorist attacks.

The Mikhailovsky Theater hosted the first premiere of the season — the opera The Magic Flute staged, set and costumed by Pet Halmen. Conductor of the Mariinsky Theater Gavriel Heine was at the podium. The performance became a joint project of the Mikhailovsky Theater and the Lausanne Opera. The director died four years ago, and the St. Petersburg production was handled by Eric Vigier, director of the Lausanne Opera. If such a performance had appeared a couple of years earlier, it might not have seemed very relevant. And today, the strict, pure, black-and-white aesthetics, in which the production, stylizing the theater of the Mozart era, is solved, has turned out to be a balm for the soul, tormented by daily reports from the battlefields or terrorist attacks.

To the double anniversary, which will take place next year, 2014 - the 170th anniversary of the birth of N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov and the 100th anniversary of the infamous production of The Golden Cockerel, performed by Diaghilev and Fokin in Paris as part of the Russian Seasons - The Natalia Sats Children's Musical Theater decided to come as the most prepared: to reconstruct this performance on its stage and take it to the French capital for demonstration on the very stage where the premiere took place in 1914 - at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. At first glance, the idea is stunning: "Russian Seasons" in the minds of today's enlightened public is a series of continuous successes that have elevated Russian art to an unattainable height and made all of Europe talk about it. If you try to dig deeper into the question, then a gift for anniversaries may seem somewhat dubious. When the cockerel dances When the cockerel dances 1/9 It is known that it was this production that at one time caused sharp rejection and protest from the composer's relatives and friends: his widow N. N. Rimskaya-Korsakova and his inner circle spoke out sharply against the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthis performance, where from The Golden Cockerel, contrary to him genre affiliation, they made an opera-ballet, leaving the visual and plastic drama at the mercy of the dancers, and leaving only the "voice acting" of the parties to the opera artists. Andris Liepa, who in recent years has been very keen on the reconstruction of Diaghilev's ballets, has now reached the Cockerel, and Georgy Isahakyan, the director of the Sats Theater, met his idea with a bang and co-authored this reconstruction. How to relate to this phenomenon today, a hundred years later? Maybe we should not get hung up on the conservative-protective protests of some of our contemporaries, but try to look at all this with a fresh modern look? The author of these lines, despite all his reverence for the "main Russian storyteller from the opera", decided to do just that, and try to evaluate Liepa-Isahakyan's initiative outside the circumstances of a hundred years ago. Whether there was a protest, whether it was not, how significant it was, what was its all-Russian and European resonance - it does not matter. In the end, regardless of the justification of these protests, the unusual performance itself has long become a legend, the memories of which are alive on the pages of any book, any study of Diaghilev's seasons - it seems that this was an event no less important than purely ballet premieres, the discovery of Russians in Europe composers, Shalyapinsky Boris Godunov ... It turns out that there is little left of that performance other than memories. The easiest way is with scenography and costumes: although the sketches are scattered around the museums and archives of London, New York and Moscow, they still exist, and with painstaking work they were able to collect and actively use them during the reconstruction. But what has not been preserved at all is the recordings of Mikhail Fokin's choreography: in fact, Liepa and his colleague choreographer Gali Abaidulov had to invent dances anew. Of course, they relied on all those materials that capture Fokine's legacy (short film fragments, photographs, paintings depicting Fokine's ballets), which are still available, but, frankly, this turned out to be so little that it is impossible to consider the performance of the Sats Theater as a full-fledged reconstruction. The scenography of Natalia Goncharova was recreated by our famous theater designer Vyacheslav Okunev, and this is perhaps the strongest side of the current performance. The gaudy, in the aesthetics of a lubok scenery, recreating the royal chambers of Dodon in full size in the first and third acts, the romantic moon on the backdrop above the graceful tent of Shemakhanka magically appearing from nowhere in the second - all this gives the performance a vivid visual image, the image of a real fairy tale, so appropriate especially in children's theatre. Unusually good costumes, sustained in the same vein: colorful, multi-feathered, flashy colors, they look convincing - as if descended from the pictures of an old book of fairy tales, the same one that you read as a child. For the Shemakhanskaya queen and her dancing female servants with long and black “snake braids” as black as the night, the artist finds a gentle romantic solution: here it is no longer grotesque and mockery, not discharged parsley of extreme acts, but high aestheticism, a real service to beauty, even if and beauty, behind a beautiful form hiding evil. However, it is very difficult to judge who is a negative and who is a positive character in Pushkin's Golden Cockerel - Rimsky-Korsakov, and least of all with such a black-and-white rating scale one should approach Shemakhanka - a mysterious and ambiguous character. It is the oriental beauty-sorceress and the corps de ballet surrounding her who are endowed with truly great choreography: first of all, this comes from the music - subtly beautiful - on which the dances fall harmoniously. The rough, deliberately simple, even somewhat “stupid” music of the extreme acts, which depicts the “Dodon society”, does not rhyme well with high choreography: basically, it turns out to be some kind of unconvincing, rather primitive drama ballet, with the same set of movements, more like a pantomime than a dance. It is difficult to say how Fokine did it, how he managed to overcome this “resistance of the material”, but if there was something of the same kind, then one has to agree with the reproaches of Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova: her husband’s operas are works of a completely different genre, created not for choreographic solution of dramatic issues. By the way, the composer has a work of the same genre, into which they are trying to fit The Golden Cockerel - the opera-ballet Mlada. Opera singers in concert attire stand along the edges of the proscenium and sing, almost completely excluded from the action: only in the act of Shemakhanka dodon and the oriental beauty meet in a duet scene. They sing in the performance with exceptional dignity: much better than in Iolanthe at the beginning of the season . Yuri Deinekin does not always cope with the extreme top notes and intonation of Dodon's part, but on the whole this is a solid, convincing vocal. Sergey Petrishchev and Mikhail Gushchenko are good in small but demonstrative games of princes Gvidon and Afron. Oleg Bankovsky does not have a rich, low bass, which is necessary for the part of the voivode Polkan, but, nevertheless, thanks to clear articulation and a bright send of sound to the audience, he sings convincingly: rarely any of the performers manage to convey the text of the role to the public in this low-pitched part, and Bankovsky surprisingly succeeds. Ruslan Yudin adequately copes with the small but extremely complex part of the Astrologer: extreme top notes are taken delicately, sometimes too softly, but they are taken. The most pleasant surprise was Olga Butenko's vocals: she superbly sings the most difficult part of the Queen of Shemakha - the lot of real coloratura prima donnas from Beverly Seals to Sumi Yo. The purest intonation, convincing coloratura, confident highs, flexible cantilena - Butenko has all this, as well as the voice itself - beautiful, bright, flying. This is a truly wonderful work, worthy of the best scenes. But I was even more pleased with the theater orchestra conducted by the young, but already well-established Alevtina Ioffe more than once: the score was played with exceptional quality, all the color richness of Rimsky-Korsakov's last masterpiece was conveyed - both strings and wind instruments sounded amazingly harmoniously, pleased with high-quality solo statements harps, and even the “cock crows” of copper turned out to be performed almost without blots. The orchestra, as far as I remember, has never been the strong point of the Sats Theatre, but this time its work really inspired, and this is all the more gratifying that such a high-quality work was demonstrated in a more than difficult opera work. I would like to sincerely greet maestro Ioffe with such an impressive achievement. Despite some “buts”, the premiere of the Sats Theater is certainly interesting: both by the quality of implementation, and as a fact of pure art that reproduces for us, for contemporaries, to the extent that it is, of course, possible, a historical artifact of art - albeit ambiguous (not at the moment of his birth, nor today), but undoubtedly worthy of attention.

A new premiere at the Natalia Sats Children's Musical Theater - and again something unusual. The artistic director of the theater Georgy Isahakyan did not have time to accept The Golden Mask for staging the very first opera in the world, The Game of Soul and Body, as another exotic project: the reconstruction of the play The Golden Cockerel, shown almost 100 years ago in Paris by the great Russian producer Sergei Diaghilev, choreographer Mikhail Fokin and artist Natalia Goncharova. And all this is for children who enthusiastically perceive not only the colorful spectacle, but also the brilliant music of Rimsky-Korsakov. Theatre. Sats resurrects Diaghilev's project The overture, which was very gracefully performed by the orchestra under the baton of conductor Alevtina Ioffe, smoothly transitions into the Astrologer's entry. And here comes the first surprise: the elegant Sergei Diaghilev appears on the stage. Or rather, his "avatar" performed by Maxim Sazhin. The famous mustache, bow tie, top hat - everything, as in the famous photo. Thus, the Astrologer's initial remark (as well as the epilogue) is a greeting from the last century from a person whose name is firmly associated with the concept of Russian modernity. Today, that modern is a classic and a tradition. And certainly something that can and should be shown to children. Andris Liepa, co-director of the production and initiator of the revival of Diaghilev's "Russian Seasons" (in July this year, the world tour of "Russian Seasons of the 21st Century" will take place for the sixth time at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris), together with Georgy Isahakyan, combined the reconstruction with new original solutions. Scenography and costumes with the help of the artist Vyacheslav Okunev are practically exactly reproduced. It was impossible to restore the choreography, but the choreographer Gali Abaidulov stylized the plastic and dance drawing. The concept of the synthesis of opera and ballet has also been completely reconstructed: the singers (in strict concert costumes) stand at the edges of the stage, academically commenting and voicing what the buffoon dancers perform in the most beautiful and cheerful scenery, bright popular prints, with underlined fake beards and wigs. And only sometimes, in the most important episodes in the dramaturgy of the opera (Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the opera after all), the ballet delicately disappears and gives the singers the opportunity to take all the attention. The singers deserve it: the work of Oleksandr Tsilinko (Dodon) is very good. Nikolai Petrenko (Polkan) creates an insanely funny, grotesque image strictly according to the remark: he speaks like he swears. Olesya Titenko coped well with the most difficult game of the Queen of Shemakhan. Zarina Samadova (Cock) and Natalya Eliseeva (Amelfa) were expressive. Well, Maxim Sazhin (Stargazer) pleasantly impressed me with the unusual timbre of a tenor-altino with bright, convincing highs. The characters' ballet alter egos were also quite likable. Of course, the children liked the comical Tsar Dodon (Oleg Fomin), the literally flying Golden Cockerel (Pavel Okunev) and the beautiful Queen of Shemakhan (Natalia Savelyeva) the most. By the way, Ilse Liepa will dance this part in the Parisian version. In the last scene, when the Astrologer, who appeared during the wedding procession, was already ready to demand his “fee” in the form of the Shemakhan queen, an understanding childish voice was heard in the hall: “I also fell in love ...”