7.17.2003
Kirov at the Met, week one
[Posted 12:23 PM by James Panero]
The New Criterion music critic Patrick J. Smith writes in with a review of the Kirov Opera at Lincoln Center. (May say that I was at Khovanshchina last Thursday and fell head first for Olga Borodina.)
The visit of the Kirov Opera of the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg to
the Metropolitan Opera House in July as part of the Lincoln Center Festival
2003 brought some interesting material along with the huge apparatus of the
company, led by (and mostly conducted by) the indefatigable Valery Gergiev.
One of the chief novelties was the premiere of Prokofiev’s Semyon Kotko (I
saw July 9), a work written just after Prokofiev’s return to Russia and
premiered in 1940 during the days of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. It is
unashamedly pro-Leninist, and consciously adopts a “popular,” tonal style at
odds with Prokofiev’s earlier “bad boy” image. The story, about the good
soldier Kotko coming back from The Great War to fight White Russians,
Germans, and Cossacks, is simple-minded, and the upbeat ending — here,
staged as “the East is Red” with the chorus in Mao-suits holding The Little
Red Book–mawkish and deeply ironic, in several ways, since at the time
Prokofiev composed this music he knew of the arrest of his friend Meyerhold
(who was to have directed the opera). Indeed, to what extent Prokofiev
believed any of this–beyond sympathizing with a certain humanity for the
title character–is unsure, but if one can ignore entirely the story the
music has a good deal of empty but jolly bombast and some swinging
effectiveness about it, as if the composer was glad to be freed from the
Stravinskian thickets of modernism.The performance (Gergiev conducting) emphasized the surface brilliance, and
was set on a unit set of a bombed-out landscape (set designer: Semyon
Pastukh); Yevgeny Strashko made a strong and sympathetic Kotko, and the
large cast demonstrated the power of ensemble that is one of this company’s
strengths.
Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina (which I saw July 14) is a sprawling masterpiece,
and the composer’s rejiggering of Russian history into seven scenes leading
up to the triumph of Peter the Great must be one of the great set-pieces of
operatic history in the repertory. Certainly the powerful scene of the
“dialogue of the deaf” confrontation with the older Khovansky, head of the
Strelsy, the Prime Minister Golitsin, and the monk Dosifei while one of the
very few scenes of politics in opera is also one of the most telling scenes
of the work, with Mussorgsky’s music, here as elsewhere — exactly right.
I cannot imagine a stronger production, set in old-fashioned but refurbished
sets, costumed with lavishness and historical accuracy, and blessedly
without contemporaneous “relevance” imposed on it. The bass-prominent
chorus (what a group!) sang with dedication and spirit, and the cast was
well-chosen, from Sergei Alexashkin’s Ivan Khovansky to Valery Alexeev’s
wily but fervent Shaklovity to the always-strong Gennady Bezzubenkov as
Dosifei.
But it was the artistry of Olga Borodina’s Marfa that stood out, even among
this magnificent ensemble, for her gorgeous shaping of the “divination by
water” scene, and for her soft singing (heard throughout the house!) and
utterly convincing portrayal of channeled fervency bordering on fanaticism.
This was one of the signal portrayals of character on the Met stage.
Gergiev conducted with a certain deliberation, as if in homage to this
extraordinary work, and it bloomed like a flower.
Anton Rubinstein’s The Demon (1875), given a concert performance July 15, is
his most famous (if largely unproduced) opera, and whatever fame attaches
to it centers on the title role, a sort of Germano-Russian counterpart to
Boito’s Mefistofele in the demon’s overweening malignity, and most famously
sung by Chaliapin. The best music in the score lies with him–he
possesses poor Tamara, destroys her fiance and finally, after much musical
huffing and puffing sends her to the Berliozian-cum-Gounodian heavenly
choirs as he resumes his ever-doomed way.
Rubinstein’s music is largely in the nineteenth-century romantic vein
combining Western and Russian influences, but rather clotted orchestrally
and definitely over-elaborated. The opera was not helped by Gergiev’s very
loving lingering over every note, as if it were by Mussorgsky, which drew
out the tale and made the rather threadbare nature of the composition
glaringly evident. Yevgeny Nikitin hectored splendidly (if without that
final measure of dominance) as the Demon, and Marina Mescheriakova harnessed
her large soprano to enliven the much-put-upon Tamara — a heroic effort of
vocalism that yielded results beyond the innate quality of the role itself.