BETROTHAL IN A MONASTERY
I had a chance to see
a second time within a week St. Petersburg Chamber Opera’s performance, this
time on their home turf in St. Petersburg. Their home stage is situated not far
from the Mariinsky Theatre and you can reach it from Nevsky Prospekt by the
same busses and by several other busses and trolleybuses (5, 22) that go to
Ploschad Truda. Their home stage is not very big, but they have not skimped in
gold decorations and the performances are quite interesting.
This time I went to
see Sergei Prokofiev’s opera Betrothal in a Monastery, which is not that widely
performed outside the Russian speaking world. The storyline is that of a
typical opera buffa: lovers’ intrigues, mistaken identities, but in the end all
misunderstandings are corrected and all live happily ever after.
The music is easily
recognized as Prokofiev’s. Really beautiful and stunning changes of style. I
have liked the other operas I have seen by him, so I was not very surprised
when this one was also good. The Chamber Opera’s little orchestra together with
conductor Maksim Valkov played really well.
The direction of the
opera by Juri Aleksandrov was rather unusual. It is probably telling, that
there was no synopsis in the programme leaflet, just a short story by the
director. The story was made even more farce-like than the original, which at
least my row-mates liked; I could have done with a little bit less hassles. The
choir singing in an aerobic lesson was a bit weird a solution, but on the other
hand the feast scene of the monks was hilarious.
One of the funniest
parts of the whole opera was when Don Jerome tried to take over the conductor’s
job. Maksim Valkov turned out to be not only a good director but also a not-too-shabby
comedian. When he said that he will soon ask help from the trade union, I think
the whole audience started to laugh (excluding perhaps those who did not understand
Russian).
The soloists were once
again top class. Purely by personal preference, I liked above all Vsevolod Kalmykov
in the role of Don Jerome, Egor Chubakov as Don Ferdinand and Viktoria Martemyanova
as Clara. Partly the audience could enjoy the singing at very close range,
since certain scenes were performed in front of the audience and on the aisles.
In Russia the stand is regularly used as the stage and I have once sat in
listening Prokofiev’s War and Peace, when the gentleman sitting next to me
suddenly stood up and started to sing scaring me half to death. Though I had
actually wondered about his unusually elegant outfit.
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