The Gamblers by Shostakovich, T 16 feb 2022, No (2021/2022), Režisēja Tatyana Karpacheva, Yuri Alexandrov, Diriģents Evgeny Khokhlov, Samara Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Samara, Russia

Being evacuated in Kuibyshev in 1941-43, Dmitri Shostakovich decided to write an opera based on a play by Nikolai Gogol, one of his favorite authors, whose works he could quote whole pages by heart. The composer did not want to change and release a single word of the play. Having written forty minutes of inventive, colorful music, Shostakovich abandoned the idea of ​​finishing the score. Nominally, because he decided that the finished opera would be unacceptably long. Already after his death, The Players hit the stage in the form in which he left them - in the form of a one-act opera, where the whole plot consists of only one plot: Ikharev, an inspired and reckless fan of a dishonest card game, comes to a provincial town, where he meets a company of the same virtuoso cheaters. In 1996, Yuri Alexandrov, with the participation of playwright Yuri Dimitrin, created a performance based on this opera called "Players-1942" at the St. Petersburg Opera Theater. This production was awarded the Golden Mask award for the best opera performance and the best work of a director in an opera. In the performance, in parallel with the development of the “Gogolian” action, Shostakovich’s voice sounds, music from his other works and quotes from letters to a friend, librettist Isaac Glickman. In 2021, as part of the Shostakovich XX Century festival, Yuri Alexandrov’s performance will find a new life in Samara.