The Slippers in the Bolshoy Theatre's Chamber Stage in Moscow, the 29th of March, 2019

 After seeing in the beginning of the year in St. Petersburg Tchaikovsky’s opera ”The Enchantress”, I decided to continue collecting his earlier operas. So, this time I ended up in Moscow, where I saw the opera ”Slippers” (Черевички) on the Chamber Stage of the Bolshoy Theatre, which is situated a short stroll away from the main theatre building. The Chamber Stage is a small, intimate stage that suited a fairytale opera like “The Slippers” nicely. The singers were close to the audience (lots of entrances actually happened through the audience) and strong, Russian operatic voices more than filled the room. There was no texting machine available, so I recommend reading the storyline and/or libretto well before the performance, especially if you don’t understand Russian.

The history of ”The Slippers” is interesting. The libretto is based on the story ”The Christmas Eve” by Nikolai Gogol. The libretto by Yakov Polonsky was originally meant for another composer and Tchaikovsky sort of inherited it. His first version was called ”Vakula the Smith”, but it was not a huge success. Therefore Tchaikovsky decided to edit it and renamed it ”The Slippers”.

The opera tells about Vakula (a smith), who is in love with Oksana. The girl teases him and says that in order to win her love, he must get her similar slippers as the empress is wearing. At the same time Vakula’s mother Solokha is courted by more than one man and among these men is also the Devil himself. Vakula manages to catch the Devil and forces him to take him to the royal court in St. Petersburg. Vakula asks the empress to give him a pair of her golden slippers and amused she gives them to him. Vakula returns home and Oksana confesses that she would have married him even without the slippers.  

From the musical point of view, the opera wasn’t in my opinion typical Tchaikovsky. It was not a huge artistic experience, but it had its moments and I do not regret travelling to Moscow to hear it.

Since the stage was rather small, set designers had used their imagination in creating Vakula’s small village and the capital city (Irina Akimova Yury Ustinov). The main role in set design was played by curtains. The first curtain in the front was used as the background for video projections and the other curtain in the back was used to create the set (e.g. the silhouette of St. Petersburg was painted on it).

The sound of the orchestra was not at its best in these small premises, but fortunately the singers more than compensated it. The role of Vakula was sung with gusto by the tenor Alexander Chernov. The aria in the beginning of the third act, that actually reminded me of Lensky’s aria in Eugene Onegin, was spectacular. The suberb Irina Kokorinova sang the role of Solokha. I must say the Russian school voice formation really suits mezzo-sopranos. And Alexey Prokopyev in the role of the Devil truly continued the fine tradition of the Russian basses.  

The Chamber Stage

The performers