Displaced wholeness – Newspaper Kommersant No. 45 (7490) of 03/17/2023

Soprano Elena Stikhina made her debut as Elsa in Lohengrin: she sang the Wagnerian heroine at the Mariinsky Theatre, where Valery Gergiev conducted his favorite opera from his youth on the occasion of the return of the soloist after a long European tour. Tells Vladimir Dudin.

In 2017, the dizzying rise of Elena Stikhina’s international career was quick to be compared with the early successes of Anna Netrebko, especially since it was the latter young soprano who then replaced Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Paris Opera Bastille. The singer comes from the closed town of Lesnoy in the Sverdlovsk region (population – less than fifty thousand people) studied at the Moscow Conservatory, then at the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Singing Center, and began working on the stage of the Primorsky Opera and Ballet Theater. Already from Vladivostok, the rumor about her reached Valery Gergiev, who without hesitation took her to the party of the first position. Her stunning debut in the premiere of Strauss’s Salome, directed by Marat Gatsalov, gave Stikhina a head start in the most literal sense: in this performance, the director placed the wayward biblical heroine in one of the mise-en-scenes almost to the ceiling. Since then, Salome has become the singer’s signature part, which she performs effortlessly and with an incredible degree of vocal freedom.

For this sweet feeling of freedom, as well as for her voice – a lyrical soprano of rare natural talent – coupled with spectacular external data, enterprising Western managers immediately noticed Stikhina. In the summer of 2019, she made a triumphant debut at the Salzburg Festival, replacing Sonya Yoncheva, who had gone on maternity leave, in the part of Medea in Cherubini’s opera of the same name. Further, there were more and more engagements, and the artist resolutely took on Wagner, Verdi, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, demonstrating omnivorousness, reliability and an enviable capacity for work. The pandemic, of course, stopped the pace, but the schedule for 2023-2024 is again amazing: the first theaters, including the New York Metropolitan and London’s Covent Garden, prima donna parts in The Force of Destiny, Aida, Ballet -masquerade”, “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosque”, star compositions with the best conductors and directors. The same Salzburg Festival this summer promises her in the main female role – Alice Ford – in Verdi’s Falstaff, staged by Christophe Marthaler. For her fearlessness and willingness to fit into the most daring projects, directors generally fell in love with Elena Stikhina: she appears in the frank Salome at the Zurich Opera, and in the provocative The Queen of Spades in Baden-Baden, where the directorial tandem of Moshe Leiser and Patrice Corrier made Pushkin’s Lisa the star of the brothel of the Tchaikovsky era.

Now, in the second half of March, the singer will sing Wagner’s Elsa at the Metropolitan, in a play directed by Francois Girard, which was co-produced last season at the Bolshoi Theater. At the Mariinsky, Lohengrin is a long-lived performance that has existed since 1999; its director is the famous tenor Konstantin Pluzhnikov, who at that time was one of the close friends and colleagues of the young Gergiev, who had just received the opera empire at his disposal. In the scenography of the Ukrainian production designer Yevgeny Lysyk (his widow Oksana Zinchenko was engaged in the restoration of the performance in 2014), Wagner’s romantic fairy tale looks like an elegant and bright fairy-tale fantasy with weightless heavenly castles. The presentation of the story of the disappearance of Elsa’s younger brother in the forest, turned into a swan by the evil pagan Ortrud, does not pretend to be anything other than a direct illustration of the Wagnerian text, but with all the ritual statuary and traditionalism, it still retains the piercing pure intonation of the legend.

Of course, after Stikhina’s other extreme stage experiences in the West, such a “Lohengrin” with its old-fashioned directorial tasks looks like a real sanatorium, except for learning the text in German, of course. The day before the release of the role of Elsa, Elena Stikhina also ventured to sing Aida, where she noticeably saved her strength, losing the palm of Amneris to Ekaterina Semenchuk. But in Lohengrin, she competently and rationally placed both semantic and power accents in order to play this role at least no worse than her predecessor Anna Netrebko had in her time. Elsa Stikhina turned out, unlike Netrebko’s rebellious and breaking stereotypes, much more modest, soft and whole, and in this non-resistance to evil by violence she saw the possibility of colossal strength.