Hell is our own – Newspaper Kommersant No. 155 (7356) of 08/25/2022

The final opera premiere of the Salzburg Festival this year was Katya Kabanova (1921) by Leoš Janáček. The director was the Australian Barry Koski, who had just left the post of intendant of the Berlin Komische Oper, and the Czech Jakub Grusha conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. An attempt to play a chamber drama on the grandiose stage of the Salzburg Rock Arena was watched by Sergey Hodnev.

The textbook arcades of the Rock Manege are once again “sealed” so as not to distract the viewer’s attention with their rhythm, but there are no scenery in the usual sense – not even the black panels with which Romeo Castellucci draped the same scene in his production of Bartok and Orff. Not even backstage, everything is in plain sight. Only there is a crowd of people lined up in even rows in some shabby outfits – dozens, hundreds, and all defiantly turned their backs to the hall and the ongoing action. It turns out, however, that these are mostly not living extras, but an army of mannequins invented by set designer Rufus Didvishus and costume designer Victoria Ber – but the essence does not change: society, they say, indifferently turned its back on the suffering of Katerina Kabanova.

Barry Kosky, let’s say, is not to blame for the fact that anyone who was tortured with school essays on Ostrovsky’s Thunderstorm, this innovative thesis, and even filed in such a poster-like plastic reading, causes a spill of bile. But the efficiency of this idea, brisk as a concept and as a layout, could be weighed at a long distance – but it works with a creak. Heroes fly out of this crowd and hide in it, having sung and played their scenes. To overcome the double hypnosis of the exhaustingly huge venue and such a disposition, the director tries to enlarge the performance of the characters, forcing them to run, jump and exaggerate gesticulation, but still fails to cope with the unfortunate sense of randomness and vulgarity of what is happening. To make the strict Mrs. Kabanikha and Dikiy a BDSM couple, to force Katerina to “drown” in a suddenly opening hatch, to intersperse the action with “intermissions” with the sounds of a bell ringing or a thunderstorm under a closed curtain (while the “dark kingdom” of mannequins is once again rearranged on the stage from ranks to square and vice versa) are also means of very, very moderate shelf life.

For all that, excellent voices are very often occupied in Katya – for example, an international trinity of terribly different, but skillful tenors: the skillful histrione Yaroslav Brzhezina (Tikhon, Katerina’s husband), the strong-voiced David Batt Philip (Boris Grigorievich), the lyric Benjamin Hewlett (Kudryash ). The main discovery for Salzburg, perhaps, is the young American soprano Corinne Winters, who sang the main character with a huge strong sound, smart emotional nuance and stage charm, which, obviously, will break through any director’s decision, successful or not, like a battering ram. As for the orchestra, Yakub Grusha’s incredibly diligent, voluminous and analytical reading of the score is good for everyone, but with all its affectionately crafted details and figurative row, it turns out to be in some separate marvelous plane, which comes into contact with what is happening on the stage occasionally and reluctantly.

It would seem how often at the time of the raging covid, both the public, and the artists, and the administration involuntarily had rosy dreams: well, nothing, all these restrictions will already end – and then everything will immediately become fine, the nymphs will come running in a frisky crowd, and we will all we will immediately see real theatrical miracles. In Salzburg, this sublimation of expectations played a bad joke. Here comes the end of the first post-COVID (knock on wood) festival – and it seems that miracles did not happen. Not a single performance that looked like an absolute success on all fronts was ever found among the premieres, and after all, it happened, as it happened, it’s enough to recall the debut of Romeo Castellucci with Salome four years ago. The three full-fledged premieres of this summer, moreover, have added the cheerful The Barber of Seville staged by the Pentecost Festival (but this has been so established in the last ten years – the premiere of the Cecilia Bartoli festival migrates to the summer program) plus The Magic Flute of 2018 and Aida » 2017, slyly presented for box office reasons, not as slightly refurbished revivals of old performances, but as almost new production.

And yet it is how to look. The festival was forced, due to two covid years, to redo all its long-drawn-up plans, to sort out hellish problems due to forfeits and pre-purchased tickets for canceled performances, while improvising all the time — three years ago, its plans for 2022 probably looked like completely different. In the most peaceful times, somewhere in the second half of the 2000s, under quartermaster Jurgen Flimm, there were even worse programs – with only two premieres, with confused repertoire priorities, with a strange choice of directors. Here, at least, there is a ringingly uncompromising program core with three productions of works of the twentieth century, solid directorial names and, in addition, with a subtle link – in previous years, concepts were definitely much more strained and ridiculous – to the main theme of The Divine Comedy. That it will come out sluggish and gloomy, that Dante’s “Hell” will be most in demand – this was hardly included in the initial creative task of the festival when forming the 2022 program, a person assumes, as they say; but the creators somehow managed in advance to feel the impending mood of this summer with their spinal cord. What time, such and nymphs.