ATTILA
Saint Petersburg (in
Russia) is a great opera city, where you can naturally see especially a lot of Russian
operas. This time I saw there an
Italian opera, that is, Verdi’s Attila, which is one of his less performed
operas. The opera was shown in the new Mariinsky, the so called Mariinsky-2.
It is really easy to
travel to Saint Peterburg (or Piter as Russians affectionately call it) from
Helsinki. By train it takes only 3,5 hours from city centre to city centre
(immigration and customs formalities are handled during the trip in the train).
The Finland railway station in Piter is by a metro station, so it is also easy
to continue the trip to other parts of the city. I have lately stayed several
times in Hotel Ibis http://www.ibis.com/gb/booking/room-dates.shtml, which is a couple of metro stations from the
Finland railway station, reasonably priced, ok quality and has a bus stop in
front the hotel. A direct bus to Mariinsky Theatre stops there (No 3, ticket
costs at the moment 30 roubles) and another direct bus (No 27) stops at the nearby
metro station, so you can choose which one you use.
The conductor in this
opera was not Valery Gergiev as the web site earlier told, but Christian Knapp,
which I was only happy about. Just a hint: it is good idea always to have
something to do with you if you attend Gergiev’s performances, since he always
starts late and even the intermission stretches. Personally I try to avoid him
in evening performances or at least in long operas in the evening. I still
remember very well one performance of Prokofiev’s War and peace at Mariinsky-2,
where I had to sneak out of the audience during the final songs to catch the
last bus of the evening. Even though over half of the audience had left even
earlier, I was irritated that I could not stay and applause to the performers,
who had done well. I listened to the start of the applause at the cloakroom
waiting for my coat and just caught the last bus to the hotel (fortunately the
bus stop is only a few meters from Marinsky-2’s door.
The opera itself was rather interesting. It may not
contain so many famous arias as many other Verdi operas, but it does have
plenty of beautiful ensemble moments. The singer of Attila, Vladimir Feliauer, had
a really lovely voice, but unfortunately admiring it was disturbed by the fact
that his Italian was pretty unrecognizable. Alas, that is rather common in the
operas I have seen in Russia and Belarus. My ear also liked the performers of
Enzio (Alexander Gergalov) and Foresto (Otar Jorjikia) who both sang quite good
Italian. |
| Marinsky-2 |
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| Conductor's score |
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| The performers |
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