The premiere of the renewed production of Verdi’s Othello took place at the Mariinsky-2

Valery Gergiev conducted the premiere of the renewed production of Verdi’s Otello at the Mariinsky II at the Stars of the White Nights festival. Khibla Gerzmava performed her signature part of Desdemona. About how the old performance came in handy in the new conditions, tells Vladimir Dudin.

This year, the country’s main summer music festival, Stars of the White Nights, like everything else, has undergone dramatic changes in the composition of participants, becoming virtually Russian from a foreign one. No more Domingo, Pape, Bartoli, Netrebko or Russian virtuoso Yulia Lezhneva, who has not been shown in Russia since February last year. There are no pianists (like the usual Daniil Trifonov), violinists and cellists (like the Capuçon brothers) with a European and overseas residence permit. The loser is not exactly crying, as ordered by Herman from The Queen of Spades – the owner of the Stars, of course, will find someone and what to replace the Western soloists in order to fill the poster to capacity. But still, in the depths of his soul, one must assume, at least he longs for the lost heroes and, consequently, for the commercial possibilities of his operatic-symphonic novel. Although, as they say, sales this year are not bad.

Verdi’s “Othello” has become an indicator of another completely non-optimistic trend in the context of the system of cancellations, replacements, and bans. For the entire current season at the Mariinsky, Valery Gergiev has been doing nothing but hiding behind the tried-and-true mothballed performances of thirty years ago or offering the public “new” productions-illustrations in which there is no longer any place for a living director’s thought – only a servile-handicraft illustration of the libretto text, in order to, if claims suddenly arise, blame everything on the classics – Mozart, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, they say, “but the author has nothing to do with it, we are all in the text.”

In a series of similar aesthetics of galvanized renewals, the current Othello, which replaced Vasily Barkhatov’s radically decided production, turned out to be not the worst option. The director of the revival, Mikhail Smirnov, got a very good visual-spatial concept of 1996. From the creators of the old performance in the program and on the website, only the name of the set and costume designer, Wolf Münzner, remained, although the name of the director would have said much more: he was Giancarlo del Monaco himself, a follower of Walter Felsenstein, on whose textbooks, by the way, they studied dozens of Soviet directors.

Iago’s costume is like a snake skin, dragon-like, completed with a comb-tail on his head. All his creeds with confessions that the world lies in evil, and after death – emptiness, as well as arias of triumphant revenge, he sings, as from a podium, from a fallen cross. Performed by baritone Vladislav Sulimsky, this Iago was as interesting to follow as a hero in a psychological thriller. The art of Iago’s sadistic manipulations with the innocent face of a well-wisher was demonstrated by the singer in the drawing of the role, which combined the plasticity of a tiger and a jackal, and in masterful intonation, where the luxury and beauty of Italian vocals were fueled by the analytics of a psychologist.

Khibla Gerzmava reigned without exaggeration in her Desdemona, looking into all the nooks and crannies of her favorite party, enjoying the rhetoric of the heroine’s speech, setting emotional and semantic accents in a directorial manner. Roman Shirokikh ideally met the requirements of the image of the young seductive Cassio, reinforcing the external characterization with an impeccable lyrical tenor. The performer of the title role Hovhannes Ayvazyan reminded with hot sensual vocals and disarming sincerity of intonation about his predecessor on this stage – Gegham Grigoryan, and at the moment of strangling Desdemona made the audience seriously afraid for an innocent victim. The orchestra, in the hands of Valery Gergiev, in general, did not require scenery, drawing pictures of the southern night in an impressionistic way, drawing expressionist dramaturgy of explosive conflicts.

Nevertheless, scenographically, this performance also tries with might and main to be magnificent and eloquent – compared to the original of 1996, it has a lot of video, creating a spectacular architectural entourage of a ruined tower and a Byzantine-style Cypriot temple. Of the important solid semantic scenery – fragments of the wall scattered across the floor like islands, and the aforementioned collapsed cross with a swaying pendulum in the center – symbols of tragedy, catastrophe, a great breakdown. In such conditions, there is no time for love – it is about survival, the search for harmony in a destroyed world. And all ideas in such a system of artistic coordinates add up to a shallow, but visual puzzle: Desdemona tries to maintain the balance of harmony, and the serpent Iago destroys this harmony, moving the main character towards the abyss, straight into the hell of doubt, jealousy, destruction.