Past Production Reviews
5Another premiere performance of the opera The Queen of Spades. The Game” will be held at NOVAT on November 12. In the meantime, we are reading a review of the performance on the belcanto.ru portal: “The director’s idea of Vyacheslav Starodubtsev – in fact, strikingly fresh and exciting in its incarnation – following the conductor, captivated everyone: the musicians of the orchestra, the choir artists, the singer-soloists, and mimans… The whole performance is about how not to play too much in life and do not involve yourself and those to whom you are dear and who sincerely love you into a truly deadly pool. What does the queen of spades mean? According to Alexander Pushkin, who gave the answer to this question in the epigraph of his textbook story, it was secret malevolence. What does the Queen of Spades mean if you look at this card through the eyes of composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky and librettist Modest Tchaikovsky, meaning the timeless masterpiece of Russian opera of the same name, which is based on this story? Yes, the same! But if the literary source is generously imbued with mysticism and "grave cold", then "grave cold" in the opera, due to the melodrama that comes to the fore, and even when the plot is transferred to the Catherine's era, appears only as a spectacular romantic bait that creates a spectacular effect of theatrical perception . And according to the operatic canons of the 19th century, it is possible to call the plot-forming part of the Countess the main one only de jure, because de facto among the singers she has always been considered a typical age. So among directors to this day there is an inexhaustible temptation to stage Tchaikovsky's opera based on Pushkin. Whether they do it well or badly is another question, but there is a trend. The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, which adopted this name for the production in order to open the current opera season, has chosen a radically different path. This time the team of the author of the new artistic concept and stage director Vyacheslav Starodubtsev, which included stage designer Pyotr Okunev and costume designer Zhanna Usacheva, decided, literally, to play an opera. Having rethought with great reverence, but, what is extremely important, without drowning the well-known plot material in the novelty of the concept, the named production triumvirate did everything extremely elegantly and aesthetically beautiful. It is clear that the proposed Game - the capital letter here is not accidental - can only be a card game, but by assigning the suits to its participants, the director decides to do something incredible. He now associates the Pushkin Countess not with the black lady of spades, but with the lady of hearts, the bearer of the red “heart” suit (“heart” means love). And what does the queen of hearts mean in this case? Perhaps, nevertheless, not obvious benevolence, but a warning in manipulating the feeling of love, in which Herman seems to have thoroughly played. And then the whole performance is about how not to play too much in life and not to involve yourself and those to whom you are dear and who sincerely love you into a truly deadly pool. The very idea of this approach is insanely interesting, and such an intellectual musician as Dmitry Yurovsky, the chief conductor of the theater and musical director of the production, certainly could not help but be carried away by it. Expressing his vision on the pages of a stunningly published "card-game" booklet of the performance, the maestro seems to set the musical program. In his opinion, the whole tragedy of the events on the stage, which the new production is intended to convey to the public, “is not at all in the loss of the Game, especially since losing to the brilliant music of Tchaikovsky is not so scary, but in the fact that the Game, as a kind of virus, potentially is a part of each of us and, if no other values are found in life, it can at any moment crowd out such subtle feelings as love and devotion, and destroy a person from the inside to the very foundation. The director's idea of Vyacheslav Starodubtsev, which only at first glance seems unoriginal, but in fact is strikingly fresh and exciting in its incarnation, following the conductor, captivated everyone: the musicians of the orchestra, and the choir artists (choirmaster - Vyacheslav Podielsky), and singer-soloists, and mimans. And the performance from an imaginary deck of cards of all its components clearly develops into a real solitaire mise-en-scène and music. Giving the project a detailed and concretizing name “The Queen of Spades. Game”, the directors immediately designate the theatrical and aesthetic field of the card “battle”, stylized as an Italian folk theater of masks (commedia dell'arte). Not only the Countess - all the characters in the opera (each soloist, choir artist or mimams) now have their own alter ego from the deck of cards, their own suit and dignity. Everyone, except for the protagonist of the opera Herman, who has a special status in the performance. “He has neither a serial number, nor a suit,” the director develops the idea. – Tchaikovsky's music made Herman more of a Dostoyevsky hero than a Pushkin. It seemed right to me to contrast him, an ordinary person without a gaming status, with the rest of the world of excitement. And this is a very important starting point of the performance, its center, around which the whole Game, in fact, is built. First, the player is in the shower, in the deadly whirlpool of the Game in the finale of the production, Herman is already clearly and consciously drawn in. The performance is dedicated to the memory of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), whose 1935 production of The Queen of Spades in Leningrad at the Maly Opera Theater (now the Mikhailovsky Theater) has long since passed into the category of theatrical legends of the 20th century. Meyerhold tried to bring Tchaikovsky's opera as close as possible to Pushkin's story, but he did not think of the Countess as a decrepit old woman. Along with this, visually abstracting from both the story and the opera, the fresh Novosibirsk production, with its compactness and concentration of drama in the development of intrigue, surprisingly refracts both in itself. Even though it crops repetitions in choirs and ensembles, a number of scenes in the explication, an interlude-pastoral, a fragment of the finale of the scene in the Countess's bedroom, and painlessly omitted the parts of two players (Chaplitsky and Narumov), the two-act format of the new performance clearly reveals the integrity of the visible musical and acting images and the entire "opera symphony". According to Vyacheslav Starodubtsev, it is necessary to take into account the rules of the Game, which are dictated by the very scale of the grandiose hall of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, so the dedication of this "opera symphony" to Meyerhold's memory is not at all accidental. “We are working hard on effective acting intonation,” says the director, “but we cannot be guided only by the methods of psychological theater. They are sometimes imperceptible already in the front row, not to mention the amphitheater and the tier, and here the biomechanics of Meyerhold comes to the rescue, who was fond of the Italian folk theater, where the expressiveness of body movement, posture and gesture plays an important role. So, in the center of the new play's Card Game is the bioenergetics of the life of the characters-cards themselves, and the meticulously calculated hierarchy of actor-plastic images is precisely formed into musical solitaire figurations of mise-en-scène-symbols. Not seeing the entourage of Petersburg itself in this “Petersburg” opera by Tchaikovsky, we seem to see and hear everything in it - Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, and Petersburg of those historical eras, the atmosphere of which is recreated in the opuses of Russian geniuses of different genres. As you know, Tchaikovsky, seized by a burst of inspiration, wrote his opera in record speed in Florence, so that the idea of an Italian comedy of masks, on which the current production is based, unexpectedly gives a special aesthetic charm. The space of the solitaire performance is created by two different-sized projection screens. Asymmetrically located, they change the configuration of the angles of perception along the way quite easily and seem to breathe with what is happening on the stage.
About the premiere of the play “The Queen of Spades. Game” on the portal Sibkray.ru writes Yana Glembotskaya, rector of the Novosibirsk State Theater Institute. In the play, which is close in its aesthetics to the Meyerhold theater, spectacular mise-en-scenes remind us "that our life is nothing more than a card game on the card-table of fortune." The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater, making the high open, presented to the public the premiere performance to the music of Tchaikovsky "The Queen of Spades" in the original interpretation of the director Vyacheslav Starodubtsev. There are two words on the playbill that you should pay attention to before buying tickets. Firstly, the performance is called “The Queen of Spades. A game". Secondly, the production is dedicated to Vsevolod Meyerhold. At the premiere on October 14, it became clear what is the meaning of the director's artistic concept, and here I will try to reconstruct the idea from the stage text. The Queen of Spades, one of the greatest Russian operas, is, oddly enough, famous for Tchaikovsky's initial reluctance to write it. He considered Pushkin's story unsuitable to become the basis of an opera libretto. The director of the imperial theaters, Ivan Alexandrovich Vsevolozhsky, somehow managed to achieve the realization of his plan. And here is the time to take off your hat to the producer, to pay tribute to his perseverance and insight. Vsevolozhsky toyed with his idea, turned to different authors, until, finally, Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky rewrote the story, boldly turning Pushkin's anecdote into a melodrama. If not for these circumstances, the opera would not have been written, and the program “What, where, when?” her memorable musical intro, known to all the inhabitants of Russia from Moscow to the outskirts. “What is our life? A game!" (the third act, the seventh picture, the beginning of Herman's aria) exclaimed the latent gamer Herman, but Vsevolod Meyerhold could have said the same! He considered theatrical art, first of all, a game. It is precisely from the fundamental principle of the game that the principles of the theater of performance flow, no less influential than the method of the Russian psychological school of experience, better known as the Stanislavsky system. Let me remind you that after the defeat of the Meyerhold Theater, Stanislavsky invited Meyerhold to work in the opera studio at the Bolshoi Theater. The great Stanislavsky showed courage and nobility, rare for those times, not being afraid to cooperate with the disgraced director. Vsevolod Meyerhold even directed the opera studio, for a very short time, after the death of Konstantin Sergeevich in 1939 and until his arrest. All these circumstances arouse particular interest in staging The Queen of Spades in a different aesthetic, polemically directed against classical interpretations. By the way, the nickname of the Novosibirsk Opera House "Siberian Colosseum" perfectly matches the spirit of Meyerhold's theater, because he needed large open spaces, large gestures and a wide pattern of the grotesque, more characteristic of mass spectacles, including the circus. Meyerhold believed that the director can do whatever he wants with the play, because he is not engaged in staging the play, but creates a fundamentally different, completely new work. What is true of the play is also true of the opera. Therefore, it is interesting to understand what signs of the Meyerhold theater we see on the stage of our renewed NOVAT. First, the ultimate conventionality of space: the scene of action is indicated by projections onto two huge planes that can move relative to each other. This decision allows you to literally drive the hero into a corner in the most dramatic scenes. The costumes of the heroes are also designed so that there is no doubt - all the characters, including the choir, are just cards from the deck, queens, jacks, kings, and less significant characters from six to ten. The ties are reminiscent of the designations of card suits, and on the back of the choir artists are drawn the familiar card shirts. Such "formalism" in the design provides opportunities for spectacular mise-en-scenes: the wall of choristers, turning its back, reminds us that our life is nothing more than a card game on the card-table of fortune. It cannot be said that all the elements of the costume were interpreted. So, for example, Herman, taking off his overcoat, discovers under it a structure of unclear purpose, which can be described as straps from an invisible parachute or an intricate harness, also reminiscent of the belt of the musketeer Porthos. Of course, the imposing figure of Oleg Wiedemann, singing the part of Herman, prompts thoughts about Porthos. Be that as it may, we understand that Herman is different from the rest of the heroes. The costume of Catherine the Great also inspires respect with an immense skirt on an exaggerated crinoline. All this richly costumed beauty provides food not only for the eyes, but also for the mind. At the same time, you still need to have time to read the subtitles that run over the stage, because they contain remarks, original instructions for interpreting what is happening. On the one hand, it's convenient. This saves the audience from having to memorize the libretto or refer to the program before the start of each act. Usually, operas in a foreign language are accompanied by subtitles, but here the action is translated from the conventionally theatrical language into everyday Russian. The director changed some moments of the plot in order to rid the story of melodrama, which hinders the convincing embodiment of the director's concept. For example, Lisa is known to have to drown by throwing herself into the Winter Canal. There is none of this - no forged fence, no Moika, no Neva, which is supposed to be seen in the gap of a powerful arch thrown over a groove and connecting the Hermitage Palace and the Great Hermitage. Remarque succinctly informs us that "Liza is dying." This, of course, is less spectacular than drowning in the cold water of the Moika, but it is more in line with the general style of the performance.
La Bohème is an unpretentious and rather sad story from the life of a poor creative public in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where poverty and talent, despair and love go hand in hand. During the lifetime of the author, Giacomo Puccini, the opera received mixed reviews. Immediately after its premiere in 1896, venerable critics called it empty, childish, meaningless and too primitive for such a genius composer. However, La Boheme is a case that has stood the test of time. The love story of the poet Rudolph and the flower girl Mimi, which unfolds in 19th-century Paris against the backdrop of bustling city life, has become one of the most demanded for performances on opera stages in the world. Chelyabinsk is no exception. This year, they decided to modernize Bohemia: the director Vyacheslav Starodubtsev rebuilt all the details of the crowd scenes, worked with the artists on a thorough, deep drawing of the images. Of course, graceful scenery, costumes and appropriate and stylish video inserts also did their job, but still the main thing in a love story is the heroes. Bohemia has a well-played ensemble of actors. Remarkable scenes where bohemian characters - the poet Rudolph, the artist Marcel, the musician Schonard and the philosopher Collin - heat the stove with manuscripts, fleeing the hellish cold in an attic with ice windows, and collect a meager supper on the table - bread and wine. Anyone who remembers student revels will surely breathe a sigh of nostalgia. It doesn't matter what year is outside and what city is outside the window: bohemians and poor students everywhere live about the same. The two love lines - Rudolph and Mimi and Marcel and Musetta - are also superbly played. Mainly because, apparently, deliberately displayed in strong contrast. Tenor Alexey Pyankov plays Rudolph as gentle and restless, sensitive and loving. He's all - softness and vulnerability. While baritone Dmitry Nikitin in the role of Marcel is the whole embodiment of temperament: dry, harsh, nervous and slightly infernal. Soprano Natalia Bystrik in the role of Mimi plays exactly what is in the libretto - secrecy and at the same time gullibility, thirst for love and fear of losing it. And the beauty Musetta, played by the burning Elvira Avzalova, becomes the most multifaceted character - and this is largely due to the actress herself, who managed to turn the spoiled lady of the world into an almost tragic figure. The massive stage in a Parisian cafe against the backdrop of the Bolshoi Theater scenery is a real feast for the eyes and ears. A party of cheerful bohemia, where people of different classes collide, where former lovers meet and new feelings arise, where the merchant Parpignol presents the children (a wonderful children's choir) with horses and dolls, where wine is poured and songs are sung - the viewer is transported to Paris at the end of the 19th century (original events take place in the thirties of the last century, but "Bohemia" was slightly modernized in this respect) and becomes a witness of the seething metropolitan life. The rendered quarters of the narrow streets of the city go into perspective, as if opening from the stage a portal to the beautiful colorful past. In the interval between the acts - there are four of them - the viewer is shown a black and white "movie": a chronicle of shots from Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Carriages, carriages, ladies in fluffy dresses, men in bowler hats, crowds of people at the 1900 World's Fair - this cozy retro not only helps buy time for rearranging the scenery, but also envelops the viewer with the right atmosphere. The last unhurried generation - before a major technological breakthrough. A generation for which a moving electric sidewalk was a high-speed mode of transport, and death from consumption was a common, not so rare ending. A good melodrama will always sell well, and even more so in combination with the musical setting of the great Giacomo Puccini. La Bohème, starting its journey in the status of a shell-shocked by all, has become one of the most popular operas in the world. This is a good performance for those who want to touch someone else's life, sparkling with creativity and passion, to see its rise and fall. Starting on a major, fluffy note, the opera ends with lyrics and tears. Yet this is not a dark, not a tragic story. Artists, poets, philosophers are as light as moths. Bohemia - what to take from it? But it is beautiful, but there are always friends, bread and wine. And love is penniless. It’s a pity that it’s not for long.
"Love for China in the play was fantastically synthesized with admiration for Mozart's music and admiration for the Rococo style." The first review of the premiere was published by Moskovsky Komsomolets. The Mikhailovsky Theater staged "Marriage of Figaro" with elements of martial arts plot of Beaumarchais, Mozart made Chinese Chinoiserie ... Translated - "kitayschina". It was this style that director Vyacheslav Starodubtsev applied in his production of The Wedding of Figaro by Mozart. Boldly? Quite. Suddenly? Very. Is it funny? Undoubtedly. And somehow so easy, fun, paradoxical, beautiful. In a word, in Mozart's way ... Well, or almost ... The overture captivated me from the first bar - with a really fast pace, “correct” Mozart sound and intra-orchestral balance, possible only with a chamber composition of strings, purity and intonation accuracy of sound. The young conductor Ivan Velikanov took up the concept of the musical director of the production, Mikhail Tatarnikov, almost without losing it. Why "almost"? Looking ahead, we will have to admit that not all the singers “kept up” with the tempos taken: someone sacrificed timbre, someone lacked virtuosity. However, all these losses did not destroy the general tone and level, which can be characterized as follows: "briskly, curly, in love." On the whole, the artists performed their roles quite decently and evenly in terms of vocals and very merrily and artistically in terms of dramatic performance. Boris Pinkhasovich (Almaviva), Maria Buinosova (Countess), Svetlana Moskalenko (Suzanne), Sofia Fainberg (Cherubino), Alexander Bezrukov (Figaro) - they were all in their place, and in some episodes Pinkhasovich and Buinosov made the listeners completely immerse themselves in the pleasure of beautiful singing. A detailed study of the character, his behavior, plasticity, existence in a duet and an ensemble is Starodubtsev's signature technique, who did not learn from Dmitry Bertman for nothing. The heroes of The Wedding of Figaro are quite lively people with a great sense of humor, well, perhaps too much addicted to excessive love for China. who did not study with Dmitry Bertman in vain. The heroes of The Wedding of Figaro are quite lively people with a great sense of humor, well, perhaps too much addicted to excessive love for China. who did not study with Dmitry Bertman in vain. The heroes of The Wedding of Figaro are quite lively people with a great sense of humor, well, perhaps too much addicted to excessive love for China. Love for China in this performance was fantastically synthesized with admiration for Mozart's music and admiration for the Rococo style. Artists Pyotr Okunev (scenography) and Vadim Dulenko (video) created a world filled with the shell excesses of a French palace of the 17th – 18th centuries, decorated with flowers, birds, ornaments and dragons of traditional China. Well, what the costume designer Zhanna Usacheva did in this performance should be discussed at a special workshop for designers. The artist weaved together European powdered wigs and Chinese braids, ruffles and neckline with bell sleeves and wide belts, fluffy whipped hairstyles with Asian long pins, whitewashed faces, fashionable in the era of Madame Pompadour, with the coloring of Chinese beauties of the Song dynasty, and all this is so organic, and all this is so organic that suddenly you begin to realize the eternal truth: So the wedding ritual for Figaro and Suzanne was carried out in the Chinese spirit - with an abundance of peach and plum flowers, from which Basilio (Dmitry Karpov) was seriously allergic. The extras demonstrated elements of Chinese martial arts, and Count Almaviva, in a fit of remorse, almost made himself hara-kiri. True, this is a Japanese tradition, but nothing - here it is quite appropriate. The impulse for "enveloping" the Beaumarchais-Mozart plot was the actual fact of fashion for everything Chinese. Even in the palaces of Peter the Great there were "Chinese rooms". The fact that this impulse has grown so dashingly and entangled the entire performance is, of course, nothing more than the arbitrariness of the directors. But they absolutely do not want to blame them for this: after all, this technique did not encroach on the meaning, or on the history, or on the characters of the heroes, or on the reading of the score. Only gave more humor, freshness, dynamics, lightness, beauty, youth - all that is in this opera initially.
