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.

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The Mariinsky’s Boris Godunov Hits Its Mark

Modest Musorgsky, March 21, 1839 – March 28, 1881

The number of performances of Boris Godunov produced the biggest change in the Mariinsky Festival’s schedule since it was first announced in the summer of 2005. At first, there were to be only two. Then last winter Gergiev added a third, and for whatever reason, he decided the Festival would undertake a fourth.

Coming after Wagner’s Ring and three Shostakovich evening concerts, surely the musical burden of four performances of Boris fell on the shoulders of the Kirov Orchestra, and it would not be farfetched to presume that a sense of fatigue could possibly settle in.

Not surprisingly, Gergiev and his forces, being the workhorses they are, seemed to find the necessary energy to give each performance of Boris an intense and moving rendition . No doubt, they were aided by mounting Modest Musorgsky’s 1869 version, which calls for seven scenes in one two-hour-and-twenty minute performance.

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The Mariinsky Invasion

Like a mighty caravan heavily laden with artistic gold, the Mariinsky Theater journeyed half the globe in October, 2006, to transport the largest, and what turned out to be the longest, festival program in its international history, to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Orange County, CA

It appears these days that Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky’s tireless general and artistic director, never seems to miss an opportunity to show off his Kirov Company (as it is known outside its home base, St. Petersburg, Russia,) in any venue that can financially afford to mount it.

What made the Orange County proposal for a Mariinsky festival so attractive to Gergiev was the almost unlimited funds stashed away in the Henry Segerstrom Fund that could easily pay for the company to bring its entire artistic output – opera, orchestra and ballet – to the many enthusiastic Kirov fans who have professed an undying allegiance to the company over the years.

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