Updating resignation – Newspaper Kommersant No. 20 (7465) dated 02/03/2023

Forty-first International Opera Festival. F. I. Chaliapin opened at the Kazan Opera and Ballet Theater. M. Jalil at the premiere of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville staged by Italian director Giuseppe Morassi. The first attempt at a relatively authentic performance of a hackneyed masterpiece opened a new page in the history of this theater and festival, believes Vladimir Dudin.

The Venetian Giuseppe Morassi appeared on the frozen banks of the Volga and Kazanka thanks to his colleague and compatriot, conductor Marco Boemi, who has been collaborating with the Chaliapin Festival since its inception. Morassi is a debutant on the territory of the Russian theater. In Europe, but mainly in Italy, he is known as a lover to work with forgotten names and titles, like Spontini’s “Pasquale Transformations”, Caldara’s “Daphne”, Galuppi’s “Devil” or the lesser known Rossini, like his early opus “Happy Deception”. And at the Palladian Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, he staged Vivaldi’s Olympiad. Passed through his hands and respectable classics of the XIX century – “La sonnambula” by Bellini, “Aida” by Verdi, “Italian in Algiers” by Rossini.

The appearance of such a connoisseur of operatic rarities in the theater, where they are used to cumbersome proven blockbusters like Puccini’s Tosca, Verdi’s Rigoletto and La Traviata, or Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, is a pure accident, which, as you know, only does what creates History, knocking down stereotypes and creating wondrous miracles on bends. The previous production of The Barber of Seville by Rossini directed by Yuri Alexandrov, who started the performance with everything that came to hand – a circus, a cabaret, a TV show – has been held at the Tatar Opera with varying success since 2014. “The Barber of Seville” staged by Morassi became a kind of healing aesthetic procedure that showed how useful it is to lose kilograms of unnecessary harmful weight. In appearance discreet, all so “resigned and ingenuous”, as Rozina sings in her exit aria, as if not even promising special discoveries and innovations, with each new “frame” she was drawn in by the coherence and harmony of ergonomic ingredients, details, method, style .

The “night in Seville” written in the libretto with a few strokes in the scenery (which was also authored by Morassi) evoked associations with Venice. The sandy-yellow color of the facade of the house, the bridge, the balcony with iron shutters, the color of the sky also built an Italian rhyme – as did the interior of Dr. Bartolo’s house with an elegant staircase that hugged two floors and a gallery of graceful columns. Fuss, street musicians in raincoats, who were going to cash in on the serenade that Count Almaviva was about to sing to his beloved Rosina, the entrance of the slightly cutesy Almaviva: the stage movement according to the regulations almost plunged into sleep, but then Figaro rode out of the hall on a scooter, making it clear that what was in circulation with tradition, the director still will not let you get bored. Rosina, in her cavatina, performed with the next trump card of Rossini’s music – dancing, which the director took full advantage of. The soprano’s graces received resonance in the fine technique of gesticulation of the hands and feet of Bartolo’s pupil. The “total theater” that Signor Morassi spoke about allowed him to combine notes and words with patterns of gestures and movements in an artisanal virtuoso way. The director clung to the smallest details of the rhythm, either offering Rosina to take up embroidery and, at the moment of the Italian “ma” (Russian “but”), prick with a needle into the fabric, conveying the sharpness of intonation and temperament, then borrowing from the music her ballet-like minced digressions from the obsessive old man Bartolo.

Traditional recipes did not prevent to expose the relevance of the gender issue, exposing Rosina in the light of the femdom agenda choosing her own happiness, and Almaviva – passionate about herself to the point of narcissism. Gentle sarcasm rang out in the long-haired Aryan white-and-gray wigs of the lecherous Don Basilio and his reflection – the false student who had entered the house of Bartolo Almaviva. And when, in the scene of Almaviva’s visit, under the guise of a drunken soldier, the regiment that entered lined up along the perimeter of the stairs and “in the rhythm of the dance” began to change guns for musical instruments in a chain, as if to the pipe of a rat-catcher, this read nothing more than a delicate call to peace, without which today even a comic opera cannot do. And all this, as in the most respectable Italian comedies, with the ideal proportions of sugar and salt.

Morassi was lucky to have an excellent cast under Marco Boemi. At its top, Kazan debutant Emil Sakavov (Figaro) from the Kazakh National Opera and Ballet Theater. Abai, captivated by his cinematic harmony and phenomenal ease of execution. Tenor Yaroslav Abaimov in the part of Almaviva effectively contrasted with him with his aristocratic pallor. Lyric-coloratura soprano Svetlana Moskalenko with extravagant generosity scattered graces in dizzying passages. The director carefully prescribed the roles of the second plan, including the part of the “blue stocking”, the housekeeper Berta, who was excellently embodied by Vera Pozolotina. Dmitry Skorikov brilliantly, like an inveterate comedian, played the role of Dr. Bartolo. Finally, bass Mikhail Kazakov got the opportunity to show his devastating comedic talent in the role of Don Basilio, the one in which his colleague Fyodor Chaliapin, whose 150th anniversary this year is celebrating his 150th birthday, shone many years ago. On the birthday of the great bass, February 13, Kazakov will take the stage as Tsar Boris in Mussorgsky’s opera.