Organization

International Festival of Vocal Music "Opera Apriori"

Stage director

Boris Pokrovsky

Conductor

Lev Ossovsky

Set designer

Stanislav Benediktov

Costume designer

Choreographer

Lilia Talankina

Lighting designer

Vladimir Ivakin

Igor Merkulov

Alexey Vereshchagin

Elizaveta Muravyeva

Singer

Alexander Kolesnikov

Boot

Victoria Preobrazhenskaya

Hivrya, Cherevik's wife

Olga Burmistrova

Piglet, daughter of Cherevik, stepdaughter of Hivri

Alexei Morozov

Best man

Alexander Chernov

Gritsko, handyman

Vitaly Rodin

Afanasy Ivanovich, popovich

Alexey Prokopyev

Gypsy

Libretto

Nikolai Gogol

Russian

Sorochinskaya yarmarka -  (Sorochintsy Fair)

Sorochinskaya yarmarka Musorgsky

Public

Sorochintsy Fair

Approved

Premiere of the play at the V.I. B.A. Pokrovsky took place on June 14, 2000. Boris Alexandrovich was very fond of Gogol and adored Musorgsky. "Sorochinskaya Yarmarka" belongs to the best director's works of the master of the last period of his work. For this performance, the Chamber Musical Theater received the State Prize of Russia - and resumed it in the 2018/19 season.

Night on Bald Mountain, the Red Scroll and other devilry, permeated with a unique Little Russian flavor and special, purely Gogol humor - this is the background against which the love of Gritsko and Paras, heroes of the Sorochinskaya Fair, stories from the Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka cycle flourishes set to music by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky.

The idea of ​​a comic opera based on the works of Gogol came to the composer while working on editions of Boris Godunov and searching for a plot for a “folk musical drama”. In 1874, already working on "Khovanshchina", Mussorgsky decided to focus on the story "Sorochinskaya Fair". He writes about this in a letter to L.I. Karmalina: “Khovanshchina will appear later, and the comic opera Sorochinskaya Yarmarka, after Gogol, will be presented earlier. It's good as a creative economy. Two pudoviks: "Boris" and "Khovanshchina", next to each other, can crush, and here it is, that is, in a comic opera, the essential benefit is that the characters and the situation are determined by a different locality, a different historical way of life and a new people for me. "

Another reason for turning to Sorochinskaya Yarmarka was the composer's desire to present the "Little Russian" role to Osip Petrov, the legendary bass player, the first performer of the role of Ivan Susanin in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar, with whom Mussorgsky became close during rehearsals of Boris Godunov in 1873 –74 years. However, the death of an outstanding singer, which followed in 1878, forced Mussorgsky to suspend work on the opera for a while (it is necessary to make a reservation - the composer paused in 1875, recognizing “the impossibility of a Great Russian to pretend to be a Little Russian and, therefore, the impossibility of mastering Little Russian recitative, i.e. that is, with all the nuances and features of the musical contour of Little Russian speech ").

Nevertheless, in 1879 Mussorgsky presented fragments from the unfinished opera at concerts in Kherson and Yalta to the great delight of Ukrainian listeners: “Sorochinskaya <...> evoked complete sympathy in Ukraine; Ukrainians and Ukrainian women recognized the nature of Sorochinskaya's music as quite popular ... ”Apparently, the next year Mussorgsky made great progress in the work on the composition, since the pages of the Russian Musical Bulletin published reports about the forthcoming production of the opera. But in 1881 the composer himself died - and the opera remained unfinished. The composer Anatoly Lyadov (at the request of Rimsky-Korsakov) and the poet Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov undertook to "bring" it to publication. Lyadov soon lost interest in the idea of ​​preparing a piece for a full-fledged performance: he edited and orchestrated only five fragments (Introduction to the Opera, Dumka Parobka, Hopak, Scene Khivri and Dumka Parasi). Caesar Cui became the first composer to combine all the scattered fragments and complete the missing parts. As a whole operatic work (in 1913 the opera was staged at the Moscow Free Theater as a “semi-opera-semi-comedy”) Sorochinskaya Yarmarka was first performed at the Theater of Musical Drama in Petrograd on October 13, 1917.

In the early 1930s, the Soviet composer Vissarion Shebalin turned to opera. Having carried out a huge research work with musicologist Pavel Lamm, they published the joint most "authentic" version of Sorochinskaya Yarmarka, based only on the surviving materials and Mussorgsky's song recordings. The premiere of the new edition took place at the Leningrad Maly Opera House under the direction of Samuil Samosud in 1931.

At the Bolshoi Theater, the only comic opera by Mussorgsky was approached only twice - in 1925 (musical adaptation by Yuri Sakhnovsky and Nikolai Golovanov, conductor - Nikolai Golovanov, director - Andrei Petrovsky, set designer - Yevgeny Sokolov) and in 1952 (version by Vissarion Shebalin, conductor - Mikhail Zhukov, director - Leonid Baratov, set designer - Evgeny Chemodurov, choreographer - Rostislav Zakharov)

English

Sorochintsy Fair by Mussorgsky, Sun 21 Nov 2021, From (2021/2022), Directed by Boris Pokrovsky, Igor Merkulov,, Conductor Lev Ossovsky, Alexey Vereshchagin

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

Crew

Programme, About & Synopsis

Photos

Further reading

Performance Dates & Venues

Venues