The Kirov Opera Festival at the Met requires some discussion of
nomenclature.[1]
St. Petersburg’s principal opera house, the Mariinsky,
rebuilt in its present form in 1860, was baptized after one of
Russia’s empresses; its name, like that of the city itself, then
kept changing. The Kirov name derives from that of an assassinated
commissar, but in 1991, with the passing of Communism, the name
reverted to Mariinsky, except for export purposes, where it is still
Kirov.

Under the leadership of its gifted director, the peripatetic, not to
say ubiquitous, Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky has become truly
cosmopolitan. Russian operatic productions have tended to be
conservative, indeed retrograde, but that has been changing, as the
Kirov’s 1992 visit to New York made clear. This time around we were
treated to several performances each of Glinka’s Ruslan and
Lyudmila, Borodin’s Prince Igor, Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, and
Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery, the whole preceeded by a
gala performance of selections from these and other operas,
including some Italian ones sung in Italian.

Most impressive about the gala was the permanently onstage chorus of
Kirovians augmented by Met choristers. Unlike in the West, where only
the men wear regulation outfits (i.e., tuxedos), all the sopranos
wore the same sequined black evening dresses, while the altos wore
black without sequins but with something like silver dickeys—nice
in a regimented sort of way. At first, their sound was a bit
foursquarely army chorusy, but soon became refined, indeed