The Perm Opera and Ballet Theater presented Un ballo in maschera by Giuseppe Verdi staged by director Vladislav Nastavshevs

The Perm Opera at the end of the season has acquired a new performance. The premiere of Un ballo in maschera by Giuseppe Verdi, staged by director Vladislav Nastavshevs and the former chief conductor of the theater Mihran Aghajanyan, has already been called “perfect” by the audience on social networks. Tells about predictable and unexpected novels in Perm Yulia Bederova.

Migran Agadzhanyan served as chief conductor of the Perm Opera for two seasons, devoting himself to the top titles of the Italian repertoire. He released two premieres (the first was “Norma”) and prepared two operas in concert performance – “La Traviata” and “Tosca”. He spoke about leaving Perm a month ago after the dismissal of theater director Dovlet Anzarokov, but he was in no hurry to make an official statement until the premiere of Ball and completed the work on a triumphant note.

If Aghajanyan continues to conduct his productions, it will only be a joy for the public. After all, performances where the score and stage style and character are successfully coordinated, intertwined and continue each other, are rarely released. Masquerade Ball is just such a case. Musical time and colors in it are sustained in high tones and distributed with comfortable theatricality, and Nastavševs’ deceptively simple and graceful stage story is musical through and through. A delicate mixture of irony and tragedy, a taste for humor and a touch of sadness, scarce in Russian opera practice, like a clever attraction, convinces both adherents of the decorative approach and connoisseurs of the intellectual and poetic theater.

At a slightly exaggerated pace, emphatically dance movement and luxurious ensemble balance, a chamber, almost puppet-like spectacle unfolds on stage, reminiscent at once of the theater of the 18th century (the duration of the action according to the libretto), of the theatrical habits of the 1850s (the premiere of “The Ball” was played in 1859 in Rome) and about the traditions of the 1950s, the time of the almost mass popularity of opera in general and Verdi’s blockbuster in particular. Instead of a fictitious Boston governor and his entourage, we see a rather exhausted troupe on tour, but the intrigue with dressing up, delusions and murder due to jealousy is exactly preserved. On the stage there is a slightly rickety wooden platform, a rag curtain, dressing room tables, wardrobe trunks on wheels and hangers, but not everything is so simple. The mirror in the dressing room is an empty frame, and pieces of the mirror are hidden in the worn folds of the scenery (the artists are the director himself and Valeria Barsukova). Actors, characters, musicians are reflected in them, and it seems that their thoughts and feelings are exposed. An unintentional projection expands the fantasy space of the tent opera to outright phantasmagoria, while the public is busy investigating real and fictional crimes. In search of the real killer, mistakes are all the more fatal, the more obvious that the Verdi page Oscar with the mercury voice of Irina Baikova, the backstage Harlequin and a natural manipulator, quietly smoking on the sidelines, smokes for a reason. The doll turns out to be a puppeteer, but the trouble is that she leads living people by the nose.

Nastavševs does not turn the detective intrigue of “Ball” upside down, but provides it with an additional dimension: costumed hypocrisy turns out to be everything that Verdi refers, relatively speaking, to reality, and instead of a masquerade, the real comes. It is difficult to imagine a more predictable technique than “theater within the theatre”, but here he attracts attention with an intimate intonation and avoids speculativeness.

In playful mise-en-scenes, sensitive to operatic picturesqueness, the artists play the roles of either actors or their characters with pleasure. It seems that everyone is at ease in ironic scenes like Riccardo’s barcarolle, disguised as a fake sailor, with a wooden steering wheel in his hands and oars spinning to the beat of the music. In the same way, the actors are free and reckless in tragic and caricature-terrible episodes, as in the tercet of the third act, when the comical militarism of the avenger Renato evokes horror.

The slightly subdued emotional palette is thin and unconventional, even though the performance pretends to be a cheerful defile of templates. All the characters are like cardboard boxes: the conspirators Tom and Sam – one without an eye, the other without a leg, Ulrika (spectacular Ksenia Dudnikova) portrays a psychic, shaking her curls. But all – each in their own way – are deadly touching.

Riccardo, performed by Boris Rudak, touches the nerve not only with regular charm, but also with an unusually quiet cantilena. Anna Nechaeva (Amelia) and Vladislav Sulimsky (Renato) lead the slender ensemble with controlled brilliance. Through the explosive theatricality of the magically played and sung parts, supported by a transparent choir and an adventurous orchestra, through the coquetry of the groups and the artistry of the instrumental solos, genuine fragility slowly emerges.

When the actors finish the performance behind the shells set along the ramp of the Perm stage, they say goodbye and applaud each other, looking at the same mise-en-scène on the stage screen in endless multiplication. The sign of the old theatre, the prompter’s refuge and disguise of the theatrical machinery, the shells build an additional frame and make it dramatically obvious that if the suite of “theater within the theater” can last as long as you like within the performance (the artists give a performance in which they watch how the artists give a performance and watch the performers give a performance, and so on), then it can go on just as endlessly outside.

In the finale, the noisy company of singers, the orchestra and the audience seem to be artists and spectators of some other, also in the Verdiian toy and frightening tragic farce, if not its heroes. One way or another, the metaphor of the eerie theatricality that permeates the universal reality grows to epic proportions and does not look either straightforward or banal.