Living at the Opera

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

This article was written in celebration of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, Russia. In the foreword to John Ardoin’s book, Valery Gergiev and the Kirov, the late actor and writer Peter Ustinov remarks that for most of us in the West, the history of the Mariinsky Theater has been hidden from view. We have [...]

In February 2002 the Kirov* brought two operas to Washington’s Kennedy Center: Musorgsky’s great opera Khovanshchina and Verdi’s Macbeth. The unexpected is always welcome in opera. The underlying qual ity desired in every performance is surprise coupled with elements of the unknown. Perhaps it comes in a particular scene, a singer’s charac terization, or in [...]

This performance of Boris Godunov by Modest Musorgsky with the libretto by the composer based freely on a tragedy of the same name by Alexander Pushkin was staged by Yuri Alexandrov by the St Petersburg Opera at the Orpheum Theater, Phoenix, AZ, on November 3, 2001 On November 3rd 2001, the Saint-Petersburg Opera bussed into [...]