Living at the Opera

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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Richard Wagner, May 22, 1813 - February 13, 1883

If one of Valery Gergiev’s objectives has been to keep the Mariinsky Theater’s version of Wagner’s Ring in the minds of the operatic public, he certainly has accomplished his goal. The performance schedule that he and set designer, Georgy Tsypin, have followed since the production debuted in St. Petersburg, in 2002, has definitely been impressive on paper. Besides a couple of Ring Cycles presented in Baden-Baden, a repeat of it in St. Petersburg, in 2003, one in Korea, another in Japan and still another last winter in Moscow, the duo went ahead and booked a cycle in Cardiff in November and December, 2006, only a month after their 17-day Festival in Orange County. And in order to secure their place internationally, the Mariinsky Theater scheduled two Ring Cycles in July 2007, in New York City. It is not, however, the many cities or the number of cycles that will make a performance of Wagner’s Ring stand out, but the imaginative setting in which the highest musical and visual standards can flourish and that are so necessary if a production of Wagner’s Neibuligen Myth is to succeed. A closer look at the Ring performances, in Costa Mesa, CA, in October, 2006, will show whether the company was able to meet these standards.

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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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The Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, had as many surprises on the stage inside as the weather had outside. The month of August in this resort town is usually filled with sunshine, but this year, the festival’s first week was filled with cloudy days, intermittent rain showers, fluctuating humidity and some choppy waters, rare for the Adriatic resort town. As unexpected as the weather was, the outcome of the main operatic productions, proved equally topsy-turvy.

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When Charles Roe, the voice professor and director at the University of Arizona’s Opera Department decided to mount Mark Adamo’s Little Women, a piece Roe readily admits to having fallen in love with on first hearing, he may have had some second thoughts about producing the opera but certainly not with Adamo’s lucid, lyrical arcs of tender melodies the composer dotted throughout his score. And since Adamo also wrote the text, the composer was able to connect the many threads of emotion thereby making more substantial character studies of the four young women growing into maturity during the American Civil War, than Louisa May Alcott was able to do in her very poular novel. Perhaps it was just these two artistic accomplishments that had given Roe pause, for he recognized the opera would not only need singers who could handle Adamo’s challenging vocal leaps but they needed to cope with the quick emotional changes the composer expects from his characters. Well, the director needn’t have reflected too long for he struck gold with the vocal talents he had on hand. In fact, if there was one quality that came to the forefront of this production, it was the singing. Even in roles that might be considered secondary to the principals, Meg, Amy, Beth and Jo, there was plenty of vocal strength and beauty to go around fulfilling Adamo’s intented musical warmth.

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George Frederic Handel, February 23, 1685 - April 14, 1759

If Artistic Director Joel Revzen’s intention in 2006 is to give his Arizona Opera Company an operatic face-lift and move it into the national spotlight, he has succeeded handsomely. This was the first time the opera company delved into the world of Baroque Opera and from the viewpoint of vocal accomplishments and visual innovations, Revzen made the right choices. With his production team and in his light-handed musical approach to George Frideric Handel’s secular oratorio, he turned Semele into a full blown operatic work.

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In October, 2006, the Kirov Opera and Ballet will come to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa CA. Billed as the “Mariinsky Festival,” the company will play for three weeks, starting with the Kirov’s production of Richard Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” The following observations were recorded about the Valery Gergiev and Georgii Tsypin production on a visit to the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in June 2004.

In June of 2004 the Mariinsky Theater, coming off a successful run of their new production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” just six months before in Baden-Baden, made a hurried decision to include all four operas of the Ring right in the middle of their annual White Nights Festival held at St. Petersburg. From June 8th to June 15th, opera enthusiasts, many from foreign lands, attended this production of the Ring which was vi­sually framed by a primitive Scythian motif designed by Georgii Tsypin who filled the stage with gargantuan mythic figures complete with some beautiful and fascinating costumes by Tatiana Noginova. But in the end, artistic director Valery Gergiev managed to bring to the fore only a handful of bravura performances.

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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 been kept especially ignorant of this theater’s daily work­ings. Ustinov writes, “I had only learned about the Mariinsky opera house by hearsay, a haze of rumors and opinions unleashed by elderly Russian relatives of whom there was no shortage at the time.”(1) He also discusses the physical outlay of the building which gives the eye so much pleasure when seen for the first time. Along with its sea-green exterior bordered in white trim and a blue interior that seems to come right out of the sea, it is washed with colors, both inside and out, that would make Neptune proud. Ustinov’s comparison of the Mariinsky with the appearance of the Bolshoi Theater brings out the differences between the two theaters. “It (the Mariinsky) is a lovely building of ex­quisite proportions which created a scandal at its inception for reasons difficult to comprehend today. It was apparently de rigueur in those days for opera houses to be finished in red, cream and gold. The Mari­insky broke into a fastidious world in a mantle of blue, cream and gold, which give it a pleasant aura of lightness.”.(2)

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In today’s opera world, run over with esoteric opera directors pushing their entangled symbolic productions on to operatic stages, the musical and vocal values, the two most necessary components in presenting opera, often get lost in the shuffle. But not on November 12th and 13th, 2005, when two concert opera performances in New York City took on the frenzy of old- fashioned revival meetings causing their audiences to stand up and give a rousing toast to the musical dramas the Teatro Grattacielo Opera and the Opera Orchestra of New York bestowed on their public. For it was in the performances of Ruggerio Leoncavallo’s Zaza by Gratacielo and Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell by OONY that proved to be the special gifts their devoted fans have been hoping for and were finally delivered to them in bravura style.

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The following comments on Ainadamar were written after a visit to the Santa Fe Opera in the summer of 2005.

There must be a running debate in musical circles, particularly with audiences and music critics, as to whether Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” is a theatrical musical piece or an opera. The performance on August 14th, 2005 by the Santa Fe Opera, whose refurbished opera house is situated in the stoic, primeval mountains of Northern New Mexico, certainly did not settle the argument.

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