We don’t have unsubstituted ones – Newspaper Kommersant No. 69 (7514) dated 04/20/2023

A press conference was held in the Imperial Foyer of the historic Bolshoi Theater, at which General Director Vladimir Urin and artistic director of the ballet troupe Mahar Vaziev spoke about the plans of the Bolshoi Theater for the 2023/24 season, emphasizing that the premieres have not been exhausted this season either. Tells Tatyana Kuznetsova.

CEO Vladimir Urin began his speech with numbers. They are spectacular: in 2022, the Bolshoi Theater gave 662 performances for 556 thousand spectators and earned 2 billion 700 million rubles from this. To illustrate the democratic nature of the prices of the Bolshoi Theater, the general director divided the proceeds by the number of spectators and received an average ticket price of 4,875 rubles. However, the creative plans were impressive. Especially operatic ones: in addition to the three upcoming premieres of this season, next eight operas.

The most ambitious projects have been announced on the Historical stage.

November 23 will see the light “Adrienne Lecouvreur”; opera by Francesco Cilea with stage design by Zinovy ​​Margolin and musical direction Giacomo Sagripanti (an Italian who was not afraid to work in Russia) puts Evgeny Pisarev. The chief director of the former Tairov Theater considered the invitation to the performance to be significant – at the Chamber Theater the play of the same name by Skrib with Alisa Koonen in the title role was a hit in the repertoire. “Samson and Delilah” Saint-Saens (premiere May 25, 2024) will be directed by the director-patriarch Adolf Shapirostand behind the remote control Artem Abashev. On the New Stage on March 21, 2024 under the musical direction of the young Philip Selivanov another “Eugene Onegin”. The last time Onegin was staged at the Bolshoi quite recently, in 2019, but here the trick is that the film director took up the opera Sergey Ursulyak, debutant in the musical genre. Opera directors in the current conditions are clearly becoming the main shortage.

An unexpected co-production with the Puppet Theater of Sergei Obraztsov will be included in the “Chinese” evening on the Pokrovsky Chamber Stage: operas by Caesar Cui “Son of the Mandarin” and “The Nightingale” Igor Stravinsky to be shown by director Alexey Frandetti and conductor Alexey Vereshchagin November 30 this year. A new children’s opera will appear on the same Chamber Stage: April 24, 2024 “Peter Pan” the composer will conduct Andrey Rubtsovis responsible for setting Nina Chusova. Will complete the season of the Chamber Stage “Clowns” Leoncavallo, director Hans-Joachim Frei put them with the same Alexei Vereshchagin.

Another co-production of the upcoming season is a performance, surprisingly, not an opera or a ballet, but a drama. Big together with Small will present “Snegurochka” Ostrovsky with applied music by Tchaikovsky (orchestral introduction, interludes, songs and choirs), written for its production 150 years ago. The drama will be performed by artists of the Maly Theater (directed by Alexey Dubrovsky), the conductor is responsible for the choir and orchestra in this co-production Ivan Nikiforchin. The performance will run both in the Small and on the New Stage of the Bolshoi, the premiere is on February 1, 2024.

To the question, “when the musical director will appear at the Bolshoi Theater itself, or the absence of one can be considered conceptual,” General Director Urin answered in the sense that the theater without a music director is, of course, bad, but a bad music director is even worse.

That is why now there are more guest conductors in the Bolshoi than ever – the theater is looking closely at which of them will work well with the orchestra. The orchestra, on the other hand, demonstrates autonomy: next season, the once famous Violin Ensemble of the Bolshoi Theater, which traditionally works without a conductor, will revive.

The ballet plans are no less ambitious, although they consist of three titles. But two premieres are full-length exclusives, and they are staged by the best Russian choreographers. Well, not really: Yuri Posokhov, ex-premier of the Bolshoi and co-author of all his latest repertoire hits (“A Hero of Our Time”, “Nureyev” and “The Seagull”), is a US citizen, but fearlessly continues to work in Russia even after the start of the NWO. His two-act “The Queen of Spades”, postponed from this season due to various circumstances, will be released on December 14; composer turns Tchaikovsky’s opera into a ballet Yuri Krasavinproduction designer Polina Bakhtinaat the remote control Pavel Klinichev. The second ballet is Shakespeare’s “Storm” – composes still the same Krasavinwill conduct the same Klinichev. The two-act play is staged Vyacheslav Samodurov, who retired from the post of artistic director of the Yekaterinburg ballet. His Dancemania was the Bolshoi’s best ballet premiere last year, so he knows the company and hopefully with the help of stage designer Alexei Kondratiev and costume designer Igor Chapurin, he will be able to complete Shakespeare’s most difficult play by July 4, 2024.

Most of all, it is precisely the “well-forgotten old” that causes doubts.

“Romeo and Juliet”, the famous drama ballet by Leonid Lavrovsky, the Bolshoi Theater had already resumed more than a quarter of a century ago with the help of artists still living at that time who worked with Lavrovsky himself, but the gigantic performance turned out to be unviable. Now the director’s son will try to revive him Mikhail Lavrovsky with the help of those who danced 25 years ago. The ex-premier and current tutor of the Bolshoi Theater, no doubt, knows the main parts, but he hardly immersed himself in the life of the Verona crowd in detail. In addition, the artistic director Vaziev proposes to make some “corrections” to the production – more precisely, to make cuts, which, perhaps, will not benefit Prokofiev. However, the luxurious scenography and costumes of Pyotr Williams are promised to be reproduced with all care by the artists Sergei Grachev and Tatyana Noginova. As you know, the Bolshoi already has two productions of Romeo and Juliet – by Yuri Grigorovich and Alexei Ratmansky; they remain in storage.

A surprise is also possible: the one-act ballets by modern foreign authors, announced by the artistic director Vaziev at the beginning of this season, have so far been only half staged (due to circumstances beyond the control of the creative teams). However, with the support of the faithful Ingosstrakh, the troupe aims to complete the project this summer. If this succeeds, there will be more prime ministers. By the beginning of the 2023/24 season, General Director Urin promised to present a complete list of repertoire ballets. It’s no secret that many of the posters fell out: others – because it was not possible to renew licenses for their distribution, others fell victim to domestic legislators (for example, “Nureyev”fallen under the article about LGBT propaganda) and especially vigilant viewers. It remains to be hoped that The Sleeping Beauty, in which a man has performed the part of the fairy Carabosse since the day of the premiere in 1890, will still survive. Although who knows? After all, one sensitive spectator demanded that Atamansha in the opera “Kai and Gerda” be sung by a woman – for nothing that the part was written for bass.