Name: The Gamblers
Start: 2016-05-04T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2016-05-04T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Novaya Opera Theatre

Organization

Conductor

Jan Latham-Koenig

Andrey Lebedev

Stage director

Alexey Veiro

Set designer

Дарья Синцова

Costume designer

Svetlana Grishchenkova

Chorus master

Yulia Senyukova

Lighting designer

Sergei Skornetsky

Baritone

Mikhail Gubsky

Ikhariev

Alexander Skvarko

Tenor

Mikhail Pervushin

Aleksander Glow

Sergey Tarasov

Vitaly Efanov

Gavriushka

Vladimir Kudashev

Veniamin Egorov

Krughel

Maxim Ostroukhov

Ilya Kuzmin

Utyeshitelny

Oleg Shagotsky

Evgeny Stavinsky

Shvokhnev

Andrey Fetisov

Novaya Opera

The Gamblers

Moscow

Russia

Novaya Opera Theatre

The Gamblers Shostakovich

Public

Approved

To commemorate the 110 anniversary of the birth of Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975),the Novaya Opera Theatre presented a production of the composer’s piece which he called “unreal”.

The unfinished opera The Gamblers is Shostakovich’s second piece (after The Nose opera) based on the play by the Russian author Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852). It was created soon after Symphony No. 7 in C major during 1941 and 1942. He wanted to write a new opera according to the text of the play without any cuts. (Mussorgsky worked the same way while creating The Marriage (1868),based on Gogol’s play of the same name).The libretto was a word-for-word copy of the play, and the opera was to be very long. That was why it was not finished: ”I’d written approximately one-third of the opera, recalled Shostakovich, and then realized that the music lasted approximately an hour, and I decided that further work was meaningless. Shostakovich broke off work in the middle of a bar, at the line: ”Guests and hosts…” and never ever returned to the score. After a while, he gave the manuscript to his student, composer Galina Ustvolskaya, who kept it till the early 1970s. At the close of his days Shostakovich, without intending to continuing the work on the opera, took the score back and used some excerpts of it in his last piece, Sonata for Viola and Piano (1975).

After Shostakovich’s death, the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky made slight alterations in The Gamblers and completed the opera. Firstly, it was performed in the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Conservatory by singers of the Moscow Chamber Music Theatre and the Leningrad State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky on September 18, 1978. The Polish composer Krzysztof Meyer made his own version of the opera, composing music to the rest of the text which had not been used by Shostakovich. It was premiered on June 12, 1983, at the opera theatre in Wuppertal (Germany). In Russia Shostakovich’s unfinished opera /The Gamblers/ was premiered in the Moscow Chamber Music Theatre in 1990 (director Boris Pokrovsky). 

There are few characters in The Gamblers, as Shostakovich used only six characters (all male) out of Gogol’s nine. The plot of the opera does not have a love line, common to most operas. The Gamblers is a story about card-sharps trying to beat each other in cheating. The action is set in a small Russian town, in one room.

English

The Gamblers by Shostakovich, Frá (2016/2016), Leikstýrt af Alexey Veiro,, Hljómsveitarstjóri Jan Latham-Koenig, Andrey Lebedev, Novaya Opera Theatre, Moscow, Russia

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