The Mariinsky Theater staged a ballet and an opera by Bela Bartok. Review

The Historical Stage of the Mariinsky Theater hosted the Russian premiere of the ballet The Wonderful Mandarin and the opera The Castle of Duke Bluebeard by Béla Bartók, staged by Yuri Posokhov. Tells Tatyana Kuznetsova.

Choreographer Possokhov staged Bartók’s opera and ballet in 2016 by order of the Cleveland Orchestra. Bass Mikhail Petrenko took part in the premiere and, according to the director, at the same time he got excited about the idea of ​​transferring both Bartok to the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre. And although the singer was ardently supported by the ballerina Diana Vishneva, it took seven years before the project was completed.

The one-act “Wonderful Mandarin”, composed by Bartok in 1919 and staged in Cologne in 1926, was immediately removed from the poster due to “dangerous immorality” personally by Burgomaster Konrad Adenauer. He gained worldwide fame after the Second World War. The gloomy parable about the all-conquering passion, composed by the librettist Melchior Lengyel (about a prostitute who lures clients into a bandit’s lair, and a Chinese mandarin who cannot be killed until he quenches his lust), no longer shocked anyone, The Miraculous Mandarin was staged all over the world. Even in the USSR: in 1961, at the Bolshoi Theater, the chief choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky ventured to stage a sensitive plot for expressive music full of sharp accents and timbre contrasts under the title “Night City”. It was, of course, about the decaying West, and the unkillable Mandarin was replaced by the Young Man, who awakened pure love in the prostitute. But even this was too much: the choreographer was scolded, the ballet left the repertoire. Yes, and other productions – 1977 and 1996 – did not last long with us.

How durable will be the St. Petersburg “Wonderful Mandarin” depends on two circumstances. From the constancy of Valery Gergiev, who fell in love with this Bartok ballet so passionately that he ran to conduct the premiere from the neighboring Mariinsky-2, where he stood at the Kitezh console. And the stage longevity of Diana Vishneva, who in the risky role of the Girl, requiring acting courage and female sex appeal, seems irreplaceable. The theater pulled out a lucky ticket with the brilliant Korean Prime Minister Kimin Kim. And it’s not even the splendor of his explosive jumps and cold fury of rotations; it’s just that no one else could capture the incomprehensibility of the Chinese Mandarin, with its fluid gestures and unpredictable reactions.

Actually, these three “pillars” keep the performance, obviously adjusted to the interests of the Cleveland customer: a huge orchestra is placed on the stage in all its grandeur, leaving the dancers with a narrow strip from the ramp to the second stage. In essence, this production can be likened to a concert performance of an opera. A minimum of scenery is only a rectangular metal structure, designed to depict either a window or a doorway, and three chairs. A minimum of genre: the first two victims of the robbers are dressed as musicians – in black trousers and a shirt, appear on stage, imperceptibly separated from the orchestra with instruments in their hands, and are deliberately devoid of any characteristic. A trio of bandits of a completely non-villainous appearance honestly carry out the plot function, fluently robbing customers, nailing the Mandarin with chairs to the floor, throwing a noose around his neck. But these identical, neat, well-built and disciplined guys, purely doing double tours, are not at all like a gang of robbers. Especially for pimps: in this production, the Bait Girl turned into the main manipulator.

Diana Vishneva in a black leather jacket, leather bodice, guipure shorts and a satin bra looks stunning and feels extremely organic in those bodily vulgarities that the choreographer composed for this Girl: Diana’s sniper hit in the role is obvious from the first appearance. Complicated upper supports, split arabesques, 180-degree leg lifts and other bodily feats were given to the ballerina without apparent difficulty, but this is not the main thing; her trump card is acting. This Girl with the character of a tigress does not lure, she uses men, contemptuously using the proven weapon of imaginary accessibility. The impenetrable Chinese hurts her vanity, disarms her with an unbending will, with her unreal vitality arouses fear, involuntary admiration, and finally forces her to give up: the long, furious kiss of the characters turns out to be the culmination of the ballet. And its final point is a gesture of squeamish bitterness with which the Girl, not forgiving herself for spiritual weakness, throws the Mandarin who has expired from her knees.

After the orchestral and human passions of The Wonderful Mandarin, the languid symbolism of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle looked sluggish and artificial, while Possokhov’s direction looked illustrative and naive. The orchestra, which remained on the stage and was led by Christian Knapp, sounded phlegmatic even in the most pathetic moments. Projections on the vertical white panels separating the musicians from the singers revealed the secrets of the locked rooms with dreary predictability: black-and-white skulls, blades, diamonds, colored nature. In the finale, the murdered wives of Bluebeard (silent, and therefore ballet) danced on pointe something inspired by Raymonda, in Hungarian laying their hands behind the back of their heads. Mikhail Petrenko and Anzhelika Minasova, wandering either downstage or behind the curtains, seemed to be left to their own devices. And, in the biased view of the ballet reviewer “Kommersant”, they lost to the duet Vishnev-Kim in the same way as the conductor Knapp lost to the conductor Gergiev.