Second Opinion. Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov
By Harvey Steiman
Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.
Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the San Francisco Opera, Conductor, Vassily Sinaisky, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. 2.11.2008 (HS)
Boris Godunov – Samuel Ramey (bass-baritone)
Prince Shuisky – John Uhlenhopp as Prince (tenor)
Grigory/The Pretender Dimitri – Vsevolod Grivnov (tenor)
Varlaam – Vladimir Ognovenko (bass)
Pimen – Vitalij Kowaljow (bass)
The Simpleton – Andrew Bidlack (tenor)
Innkeeper: Catherine Cook (mezzo-soprano)

The Act I Set
Probably no other other opera has gone through as many revisions, re-orchestrations, re-sorting of scenes and acts and other adaptations than has Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Right from the beginning, the composer himself went back to the drawing board. The Imperial Theater rejected his original 1869 version, noting among other things the lack of a significant female role. By 1872 the composer had reworked the seven existing scenes and added an entirely new act set in Poland, where the princess Marina decides to use a pretender to the throne as her path to becoming queen of Russia.
The stark scenes in the original more single-mindedly focus on a dark, brooding portrait of the troubled tsar than the grander, more epic-scaled opera we are accustomed to. By the time the original version finally was staged in 1928, several posthumous revisions, culminating in a colorfully orchestrated one by Rimsky-Korsakov, had changed Mussorgsky’s tight, no-frills portrait into a grand opera.


