Hard labor of passion – Newspaper Kommersant No. 142 (7343) of 08/06/2022

The premiere of Umberto Giordano’s rarely performed opera “Siberia” took place at the festival in Bregenz, Austria. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Valentin Uryupin, directed by Vasily Barkhatov. Tells Alexey Mokrousov.

Chekhov’s sisters dreamed of Moscow, and the heroine of Umberto Giordano’s (1867–1948) opera Siberia wanted to go beyond the Urals. Stefan was not a traveler, except perhaps in Petersburg bedrooms, but she was tired of the role of the queen of the demi-monde, she fell in love with a simple soldier Vasily. When he painfully hit her main sponsor, Prince Alexis, and was exiled to Siberia, Stefan felt like a Decembrist and went after him. As a result, she died there – while trying to escape with Vasily.

Today, the name of Umberto Giordano is not seen every day in an opera poster. More than others, his “Andre Chenier” and “Fedora” were lucky, they are still going. But, in the end, the same “Siberia” was conducted by Toscanini more than once, and when in 1903 Puccini, who got into a car accident, did not have time with the score of “Madama Butterfly”, it was “Siberia” that was chosen for the premiere, as the savior of “La Scala” . Later, Giordano and the famous librettist Luigi Illica revised the opera. During the composer’s lifetime, “Siberia” was quite often staged all over the world, but mostly in Italy. Today it is an obvious rarity, a good choice for the management of the festival in Bregenz: along with the “hit” opera on the lake stage – this year “Madama Butterfly” – here they show one-act contemporary authors and historical rarities, sometimes performed for the first time, as if extracted from the archive ” Merchant of Venice” by Andre Tchaikovsky (see “Save a pound of meat at any cost” in Kommersant of July 31, 2013).

Vasily Barkhatov, who staged “Siberia” in Bregenz, faced a difficult task – the flaws in the libretto are visible to the naked eye, although, it would seem, Illika himself, the author of many masterpieces, from “Manon Lescaut” and “Tosca” to “La Boheme” and all the same ” Madame Butterfly”; we can say that in Bregenz this year there was a mini-festival of Illiki. He composed the famous librettos together with Giuseppe Giacosa, and he received an order for Siberia alone. Giordano constantly invaded the work on the libretto, abandoned the historical drama in favor of the drama of feelings, rejected the title “Woman, mistress, heroine”, did not become interested in Russian nihilism – in general, he did everything to manifest the difference of Giovane Scuola, “young school”, from Verdi, who then reigned in the musical world. The librettist was not fond of “cranberry”, he was allegedly inspired by “Resurrection” by Leo Tolstoy, but in fact by Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Dead House” (the myth about Tolstoy arose during the production of “Siberia” in New York), but not enough to write a dramatization Thus, he developed the general ideas of humanism, paying tribute to social justice and the purity of fallen women. He didn’t really know the realities of Russian life either – well, how to believe that the kept woman of Prince Alexis (the Bosnian tenor Omir Kobilyak who sings him now works in Zurich) can have a pimp, why does she need him, albeit with such a memorable name as Glebka, and in such a brilliant performance like Texas baritone Scott Hendrix? With the Canadian soprano Ambur Braid in the title part, he makes a bright vocal pair, not much inferior to the duet of Stefana and Vasily (the memorable Alexander Mikhailov from the Mariinsky Theater). But Giordano cites Russian music with might and main, from the royal anthem in the first act to the song of barge haulers and numerous folk melodies in the second and third. Attention to folklore, as well as to religious life, turned out to be quite in the spirit of Mascagni’s Rustic Honor, which became a model for the entire verist movement.

The Vienna Philharmonic is conducted by Valentin Uryupin, his emotionality is far from archival, the music is both sensual and psychological, in the spirit of the “passionate drama” about which Giordano wrote; Bregenz was convinced that it was not in vain that he fell in love with the conductor last year after Eugene Onegin. On stage, the intensity of passion is supported not only by soloists and the Prague Philharmonic Choir, but also by video (cameraman Pavel Kapinos). The huge screen tells the story of the daughter of Stefana and Vasily (Clarry Bart), who was born in captivity. The camera moves first to Milan, where an elderly woman is praying, and then to St. Petersburg in 1992, where she is looking for places related to her parents. Then she goes either to the NE or by car in the middle of the winter expanses, all this time she does not let go of the urn with the ashes, apparently dreaming of dispelling it in Siberia – one of the reviews, not without sarcasm, was called “With the urn through the tundra”.

Video intrusion into a stage production is a powerful weapon and should be used with caution. The artist Christian Schmidt – best known for his work with Hans Neuenfels, Klaus Guth and Andreas Homoki – manages to contrast the monstrous video distances with private space, whether it’s Stefana’s St. Petersburg apartment, where the computer instantly repaints the walls, or the house on the banks of the Siberian river where convicts live. Here is nostalgia, here is cultural reminiscence, and the reification of one of the definitions given by Giordano: the most realistic among the romantics, the most romantic among the realists. So you expect even greater rapprochement of times, the appearance on the stage of the camps of the 1930s, and not the pre-revolutionary years, but the conventionality of the genre takes its toll, the drama of relations is more important than the social.

Bregenz’s playbill this year was conceived with an obvious Russian accent – not only performers, but also symphonic programs, including Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich. “Siberia” here looks more like a tribute to the exotic, with which the verists so willingly worked, but the image of a distant and cold land that Giordano created continues to frighten Europeans.