Parade game – Newspaper Kommersant No. 139 (7340) dated 08/03/2022

The tour of the Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theater named after Hvorostovsky took place on two stages of the Bolshoi Theater. The parade trip, timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the birth of Dmitry Hvorostovsky, was intended to show the capital that musical theater of a far from provincial level lives far beyond the Moscow Ring Road. The tour program included three premieres of the season just ended – the operas Don Giovanni and Lakme and the ballet Katarina, or the Robber’s Daughter. Was the ambitious undertaking a success? Tatyana Belova.

The premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni was released in Krasnoyarsk last October. The director is the relatively eminent Michael Sturminger from Austria, the artists are Renate Martin and Andreas Donhauser from Germany, the lighting designer is AJ Weisbard from the USA. An even more colorful team was responsible for the music: the Slovak Peter Feranets, far from a newcomer to the Russian theater business, shared the musical direction of the performance with the Austrian Christian Koch; soloists of the Krasnoyarsk theater and visiting artists from Moscow and St. Petersburg who joined them received master classes in the Mozart style from the world star and famous Leporello Luca Pisaroni directly in the process of rehearsals.

The performance came out recognizably Central European, not to say Middle German. Laconic architecture of scenery, not a house, not a city. Balconies, stairs, doors allow endless movement, allowing the illusion of movement in space to create the illusion of a linear movement of time. Not without a couple of directorial finds (bride’s bouquet, for example, which flew straight from Zerlina’s hands to Don Juan), and without a general concept (it seems that there is simply no Don Juan as a person, Don Juan is a clichéd form, a pageboy wig, bright shirt, bright shoes, simulacrum of attractiveness). The main advantage of the Moscow show turned out to be the high-quality (not to say well-trained and well-trained) sound of the orchestra, the competent vocals of mostly full-time soloists, and the feeling of calm, solid unhurriedness of what is happening: a well-performed popular classic without dramas, without stormy emotions, but with stormy applause from the public (including in the middle is Leporello’s aria, which in Russian is usually called “with a list”).

The theater played the premiere of the ballet “Katarina, or the Robber’s Daughter” in November (see “Kommersant” dated November 23, 2021). A huge spectacular canvas, three acts, five paintings, which means – changes in scenery (the work of Alona Pikalova) and costumes (the care of Elena Zaitseva), a kaleidoscope of dance manners, a test of endurance not only for soloists and corps de ballet, but for all services. The Krasnoyarsk Ballet, in its exclusive project, decided to revive one of the lost repertoire hits of the 19th century, in fact, based on the libretto and fragmentary descriptions of dances, and recreate the score on the basis of the surviving claviers. The plot of “Katarina” does not lend itself to a brief retelling, it lends itself only to an ultra-brief one: an artist and a robber are in love with the leader of the gang, who take turns saving her from various vicissitudes, simultaneously being jealous of each other. The performance turns out to be rather a huge divertissement, tailored according to the patterns of all known romantic ballets in general. This is not hidden by the choreographers Sergei Bobrov and Yuliana Malkhasyants, who conscientiously list the sources of inspiration, but the balletomaniac eye recognizes them without difficulty and by the result. The homage goes hand in hand with stylization both in dance and in music (instead of Caesar Pugni orchestrated, and in some places added by Petr Pospelov). The result is a treat for the eyes, a relaxing pastime for the ears (although Ivan Velikanov tried to squeeze out a semblance of musical dramaturgy from the three and a half hours of umtsatsy). The robbers (their leggings with lacing, complete with pointe shoes, designed to imitate boots, turned out to be the subject of special adoration for balletomanes), who bravely danced with guns, die, but it doesn’t matter: in the next act they will come out as muses, in the next – Columbines and Pierrettes. Tragedies are not provided at all, only admiration for the virtuosity of the entire troupe. And her high-quality (and literally well-trained) work – the synchronicity of “twos”, “fours” and the entire corps de ballet would really be the envy of any Moscow troupe.

The premiere of “Lakme” took place on March 1. The staged ideas formulated long before that day about the need for compromise and the search for mutual understanding between the British occupiers and the oppressed (but ready to fight for their shrines with weapons, no matter how strange they may seem from the outside) Indians could still seem logical then. Not at all an ethnographic score by Leo Delibes and a libretto by Edmond Godinet and Philippe Gilles Place are based on the oriental exoticism beloved by the French, which at the same time attracts the audience and stings their eternal opponents, the British, but in the performance directed by Sergei Novikov and conductor Alexander Rudin, its place is taken by modern reality. At the same time, the latter – as it should be in the theater that hides its head in the orchestra pit from any politics with all its might, just to please the public’s ears – is reduced not to the class struggle or the colonial agenda, but to the opposition of seriousness and irony. Devaluing irony is on the side of the English, absolute seriousness, reaching the point of naivety, is on the side of the Indians. The viewer has a reason to smile and cry, to choose a point of identification. Or not to do this, but simply enjoy the slowly flowing melodies, since the orchestra is virtuoso and well trained, but about the pleasure of the public, applause and shouts of “bravo”, you can probably not continue.

Is it possible to consider that the three performances shown in Moscow are a ceremonial portrait of the troupe, and not a slice of the ordinary life of the theater? In recent years, his leadership has been striking in the variety of initiatives. That landing of modern operas. Those are immersive projects. That is the search for rarities and attempts to cross the old and the super-new (Night at the Museum, which did not reach Moscow, an opera based on piano music by Mozart, and, as it were, revived Bogatyrs by Borodin with a newly composed text). The premieres of the 2021/22 season show that the leadership of the Krasoper sensitively keeps its nose to the wind and takes a course on what Brecht called culinary art a hundred years ago. Fine-looking, benevolent, very high quality sung and danced performances excellently closed the “hole in the wallpaper”, formed as a result of the departure from the leisure sphere of Hollywood films, current European broadcasts and a truly relevant domestic theater. The ideal theater of the Central European model, as it is seen by the authors of the ideal and unviable construct of the “Russian middle class”: cute, classical, there is someone to applaud – and with champagne in the buffet.