The traditional Epiphany festival opened with the project “War and Peace. Natasha and Andrey”

The traditional Epiphany Festival opened with a joint project of the New Opera, the Bolshoi Theater Youth Program and the Brusnikin Workshop. Staged by director Alexei Martynov, artist Sergei Ryabov and conductor Timur Zangiev, a semi-concert version of the opera “War and Peace” was released with the subtitle “Natasha and Andrei” – Prokofiev’s score, actually reduced to the first, so-called peace part. He talks about the partial staging of some of the legendary music. Yulia Bederova.

The initiator of the project was Anton Getman, director of the New Opera, who has long and persistently promoted the idea of ​​joint intertheater productions. The practice of co-productions, adopted in Western opera production, began to spread to Russia in the 2000s, at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater, where Getman worked for several years, as well as at the Bolshoi under Vladimir Urin and in Perm, there were already joint productions with authoritative European and American festivals and theaters. However, such performances were often perceived by the public and conservative critics as rental productions, and nearly two years ago all planned international projects were stopped. Now the idea is being implemented exclusively on the domestic market – this season, Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman appeared on the stage of the Novaya in a predictably burlesque version by Konstantin Bogomolov, previously presented at the Perm Opera.

The new co-production – by Novaya Opera, Molodezhka and the Brusnikites – was conceived from the very beginning as a seven-stage project: a light, mobile, economical theatrical project with an emphasis on the lyrical content of the score in a studio director’s interpretation for performance by the joint forces of the New Opera and (firstly turn) graduates and trainees of Molodezhka. Which, of course, could hardly leave the work outside the circle of associations with Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes,” or more precisely, the legendary studio theatrical biography of “Eugene Onegin” in the twentieth century.

To the sounds of the poetic duet of Natasha and Sonya (and not Olga and Tatyana), in the smoky black emptiness of the stage, the audience sees almost ghostly white columns – material and painted as if by light. The stage space, devoid of props, whose status as a semi-concert version allows it to avoid reproaches for the lack of decorativeness and transfer the action to a symbolic plane, recalls both the legendary set of “Onegin” and the premiere of “War and Peace”: in 1946, the first, “peaceful” part of Prokofiev’s score MALEGOTA appeared on stage. And then 1948 came, the devastating resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On Muradeli’s opera “The Great Friendship”” was published, and the long-awaited production of the epic did not take place in two evenings. The full score was first performed on the theater stage only in 1955, after Prokofiev’s death.

“War and Peace” by Tolstoy is not “62. Model for assembly” by Cortázar, but this novel also has its own reflective tradition, for example, reading only “War” or only “Peace”, memorizing or ignoring French dialogues. Cinematographically, Prokofiev’s montage reading also exists in different author’s versions, which pre-legitimizes the New Opera project, which appeals to the first, partial performance.

Here the storyboard of the “peaceful” scenes is continued with excerpts from the eighth scene “Before the Battle of Borodino”, and the twelfth scene “The Death of Andrei” is adapted as the finale. The interpretation of the operatic novel is a mixture of poetry and prose: prose events accompany and confuse, complicate the search for poetic feeling on stage and in the hearts of the characters, and the reinterpreted chronology of peace and war creates a two-layer atmosphere. At least, this is how the plan is seen: the recitative-arioso-dance structure of the characters’ relationships should acquire the expressionistic coloring of an invisibly present war, which in the finale destroys everything to the ground. Conceptually, everything is laid out harmoniously and convincingly. Another thing is that, by deciding to combine plot-musical poetry with the sad flair of theatrical memories (Vera Akhmedzhanova’s video sequence plays with blurry contours of figures and objects in the aesthetics of black-and-white cinema and old costume theater) and immerse all this at once in the anxiety of the approaching war, the directors seem to for the time being they are bored. The mise-en-scène, neatly stylized to match the old opera format, appears more even and rounded than sharp and distant. And it’s as if they are tensely waiting for the denouement, where everyone will die, and the light columns will turn into the same ghostly fabrics and bandages, bandaging not the bodies, but the stage.

The same problem, but perhaps even more clearly, is heard in the orchestra: the rigid installation of the structure as a huge prologue to a rapid paramilitary climax with a tragic epilogue, apparently, places the musical form in too difficult circumstances for Prokofiev’s orchestral weaving to breathe freely. Timur Zangiev echoes the stage images – the dances sound like black and white ghosts, the recitatives are detailed, the monologues are detailed, the phrasing is slightly detached, but prominently gesticulated, the excited themes are metrically aligned, which completely neutralizes the main ones, but gives calm to the flow of the score, except for the moments , when brass that can’t cope with the text makes the audience pretty nervous.

The complex balance with its not material, but ideological intimacy makes the wood in the orchestra angular, the strings slightly worn out, or the vocal parts so monumental that the lyrical theme of the performance is constantly forgotten. However, Natasha and Andrey try to regularly remind about her every time they appear. Elena Gviritishvili and Ilya Kutyukhin (an artist of Molodezhka and its graduate, respectively) in the main roles are vocally very beautiful and convincing, but they seem to feel too visible in the puppet theater, as the orchestral-stage fabric seems to be. Their timbres are brightly and evenly colored, the phrasing is very careful, but the subtle nuances of feelings, colors, dynamics, rhythms, with the exception of brief moments, remain outside the scope of the show. The characters are looking for ensemble interaction, Prokofiev’s dramaturgy cleverly separates them, and the theatrical construction is forced to glue them together, so that a large, dramatic sound becomes the only way to a duet. Meanwhile, on the stage there are whole scatterings of brilliant and equally large voices: Igor Onishchenko (Kuragin), Danil Knyazev (Dolokhov), Ulyana Biryukova (Helen), Valeria Tolunova (Sonya), Anna Yurkus (Princess Marya), Ilya Legatov (Pierre, in addition to the exhibition sound, fortunately, it also gives the score many nuances). They are accompanied by artistic and authoritative company from the soloists of the New Opera, led by Alexandra Saulskaya-Shulyatyeva (Akhrosimova). And no matter how you evaluate the performance as a whole and in detail, its uniqueness lies in the fact that in the studio’s fresh director’s optics with the support of a venerable theatrical institution, we see the Molodezhka artists as a generation and a phenomenon, and not just as participants in concert programs or in individual roles in different repertoire performances.