“We are all becoming the same type, ranked, standardized”

Russian bass Alexei Tikhomirov will make his debut at the legendary Colón Theater in Buenos Aires as Mephistopheles. Once, Chaliapin, also a native of Kazan, shone with this part in the Buenos Aires theater. About the image of Mephistopheles, the impossibility of the Chaliapin phenomenon and work with Teodor Currentzis Alexey Tikhomirov told Vladimir Dudin.

– You will make your debut at the Colon Theater, but is this not the first time you sing Mephistopheles?

– Yes, I have never performed at the Colon Theater before, I have never been to Argentina, but I often visited other countries of Latin America, in Chile I performed more than ten times in various operas from Don Giovanni to Turandot, sang “Requiem” by Verdi, in the theater of Sao Paulo and Mexico, in the “Bellas-Artes” in Mexico City – Boris Timofeevich in “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by Shostakovich. I have been singing Mephistopheles since 2005, starting the story with him at the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Singing Center, then at the Novaya Opera, where Jan Latham-Koenig conducted Gounod’s Faust, so I have experience with this character.

– And in what era does this character appear in Stefano Poda’s production?

– Mephistopheles will appear as a fashionista with a lot of disguises, but this is a common Italian idea. This production was already shown in Turin, where our Zeus of the bass department shone – Ildar Abdrazakov, whom I watched on video when I was preparing for the performance. On the one hand, it makes an impression outside of a certain time, but still very much like ours. In the theater today, everyone is worried about the fate of the scenery, which should arrive from Turin by sea, but have not even left the port yet. The question is whether we will have time to rehearse on it, because there are a lot of subtleties in the production, including precisely technological ones – a large ring that goes down and up, and so on.

– Do you quickly join new productions?

– It’s one thing when the material is new and you still don’t have freedom in dealing with the text, it hasn’t been “trodden into your feet” yet so as not to think about it. But I have performed the role of Mephistopheles many times, I can imagine it well. To all of us, the basses, Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin left a reminder of what Mephistopheles should be like. When you watch his facial expressions and plasticity, you understand how multifaceted this image is. It was not for nothing that Goethe wrote that for the Creator Mephistopheles is one of the few demons who “do not irritate” him. I don’t consider Mephistopheles a villain at all, but he always asks Faust if he is ready to take this or that step. At one time, our great Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya also taught me how to sculpt this image. I remember how she criticized my make-up before one of the performances: “My God, what kind of puppet theater is this?! I don’t see your facial expressions! Everything looks like you’ve been sawn out of wood.”

– You are talking about imitation of Chaliapin, but how possible is Chaliapin’s phenomenon today, both creative and market, if you like?

— In our time, this is almost impossible, in my opinion, because the dictatorship of the director in the opera world is colossal. Everything that is done on the stage happens at the will of the director, and no individuality is expected from the artist. Although there are exceptions among directors who trust the artist. Unfortunately, we are all becoming the same type, ranked, standardized. The theater is too “combed”, the make-up has been simplified to television: nothing is needed, just raise your eyebrows a little, as for a camera in a reportage. The artist has become a “raw material”, they no longer see in him the possibility that he himself can find something. And this deprives us of the most important thing – the possibility of improvisation on stage. We live in a robotized time, when everything has already been decided for us and we do not have freedom either in choosing costumes, or in choosing makeup, some kind of idea for a performance. But Chaliapin put on his own make-up, took his costumes with him, was his own director. And that’s not to mention the voice, which makes an amazing impression even in imperfect recordings with hiss.

But the theater has changed in a hundred years.

— Yes, and I, of course, perfectly understand that everyone should mind their own business. But just when you once again hear from some director “Well, you can do something like this, and there it is like this” – at that moment I stop him: “Stop. What specifically would you like to do? For what?” And you know, not so long ago, at the rehearsals of Prokofiev’s War and Peace in Geneva, where Calixto Bieito was at the head of the production, with whom I had worked in Weber’s Free Strelka in Komische Operas, my proposal for solving the mise-en-scène was hooray. I sang the part of the elder Bolkonsky, and Liene Kincha sang Maria Bolkonskaya. Calixto gave me freedom, later adding even more rigidity to show the patriarchal foundations of the family. The horrors of the war impressed him after watching the painting “Come and See” by Klimov. Nevertheless, everything remained in words, and in the performance itself there was no smell of war, we were given empty pizza boxes to portray hunger. The stage was strewn with balloons, which my hero had to “blow up”. I feel that we are doing some kind of nonsense, crawling with boxes, sticking children’s drawings on the walls with adhesive tape, and the music dictates military operations. At my own peril and risk, I began to improvise – I turned the pizza box inside out, pushing it like a Teutonic helmet, then added other “armor” – it turned out to be a robot knight. The director noticed this, stopped the rehearsal and said that it was brilliant.

– Not so long ago you performed the bass part in Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony together with Teodor Currentzis. Is it easy to work in this mode with the maestro, who is also persistently moving away from the usual and expected interpretations?

“Working with Theodore was an indescribable pleasure, he is all about music. I saw in him a senior mentor, a brother who does not indicate, but trusts as a performer and then begins to “play” on you as on an instrument, controlling your breath. Theodore, by the way, also demonstrated a mastery of his own voice, showing how it is possible to perform a not very convenient move from a low tessitura upwards. Following him, I also succeeded, for which I received praise, and this is always very pleasant.

“It’s a very terrible symphony about death. To what extent can such music devastate you?

– Any party requires return, absolutely any. But there are those that really exhaust you emotionally, it is impossible to sing them every day. A day later you come to your senses and then again you have to sing the tragedy. The main thing is not to lose your temper. I used to play Boris Godunov at the Royal Opera in Liege. Listening to Pimen, he became interested in the game, he began to play a heart attack. “Oh, stuffy, light!” – and for a second I felt that I could faint. On the phrase “Prince soon” I realized that I could not sing, I could only hoarse. I began to urgently inspire myself, set up: “Lesha, calmly, we are working, everything is not serious. This is not happening to me – to my hero. Spasms, go away! There are such dramatic moments in our business that can very much put you in a state. Vishnevskaya said: “Temperament is the ability to restrain oneself. Everyone can bite backstage. And to do this without unnecessary fluttering, in order to squeeze a tear and emotion out of the public, only a professional can. This needs to be learned and sought.”