The Tale of Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov, от (2018/2018), Режисиран от Ekaterina Malaya, диригент Valery Trubin-Leonov, Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre, Vladivostok, Russia

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is called the greatest storyteller in the history of Russian music, and The Tale of Tsar Saltan is the most cheerful of his operas. Written on the plot of Pushkin, it was created for the 100th anniversary of the birth of the brilliant Russian poet, and the composer strove to follow the text of Pushkin's original as closely as possible. Indeed, the poetic lines of the immortal fairy tale literally tease the imagination, suggesting a musical solution: a wonderful squirrel sings “In the garden, in the garden”, and the Swan Princess “says in Russian”. Rimsky-Korsakov wanted to compose music to match Pushkin's fairy tale - something Russian, popular, fair. The composer managed to carry out this plan so brilliantly that after the premiere of the opera he was called nothing more than “musical Pushkin”. Rimsky-Korsakov kept not only the long, to match the epics, The composition method itself is a detailed artistic illustration, which the composer imagined as a “drawing by cells” - akin to the art of folk embroidery or masters of Palekh painting. Here, Rimsky-Korsakov's love for jewelry decoration and careful writing out of "delicious" details, his talent for colorful and inventive instrumentation was truly where to roam. Accurate characteristics of the characters create juicy and picturesque images in a folk way. Absolutely magnificent are the symphonic fragments that brought Rimsky-Korsakov a resounding success even before the premiere of the opera: the orchestral intermission "Three Miracles", depicting the magic of the city of Lollipop (a squirrel gnawing golden nuts, thirty-three sea knights led by Chernomor and the beautiful Swan Princess), and the famous "Flight of the Bumblebee", which became one of the main "hits" of musical classics. Nadezhda Kulygina