That's a mouthful of a title, innit? This is a somewhat surreal fairy tale thing, similar to Sadko, although this one is from a story by Pushkin. We have three sisters, all of whom want to marry the tsar; he chooses the youngest, Militrisa, as you do, and the jealous older two along with their mother plot their revenge: when the tsar is away at The Wars, they devise a scheme whereby Militrisa and her young son, Gvidon, are sealed in a barrel and thrown into the sea. However, the two of them survive, washing up on an island. Gvidon saves a swan from being eaten by a kite and in gratitude it makes a city appear on the island of which he becomes prince. Ultimately the swan becomes a woman, and they're going to get married. They return to the tsar's kingdom, and there is general rejoicing; everyone's so happy that they even forgive the schemers. Hurray!
Rimsky-Korsakov's music, goddamn, man. This is the one where we get "Flight of the Bumblebee," but there's plenty more great stuff where that came from, some of it so Russian-sounding that it feels as though someone should be playing Tetris over it. I suppose Rimsky-Korsakov played a big part in creating our impression of what traditional Russian music is. Good for him. There aren't exactly any show-stopping vocal numbers, but everyone here acquitted themselves well. I especially liked Svetlana Aksenova as Militrisa. She's got plenty of vocal power and uses it well.
Still, I must talk about this production, which is definitely...polarizing. See, the idea here is that Militrisa is actually a contemporary woman with an autistic son, and she interacts with him through fairy tales, of which this opera is one. I saw some good reviews, but I was extremely skeptical about this concept going in. I must admit, though, I did start warming to it considerably, somewhat to my surprise. In the first act, we have most of the character dressed in exaggerated fairy-tale costumes, while Militrisa herself is dressed in a sober skirt/sweater combo. Her son (Bogdan Volkov, who--though I'm certainly not an expert--certainly seems to capture the mannerisms of an autistic person extremely well) just sort of hovers in the background, looking on.
But things really take off in the second act, where Gvidon is actually a character (and it comes as a bit of a shock when he first starts singing). There are very striking animated ink drawings of the fairy-tale action, as he starts to participate in the fantasy, and I have to say, I thought this was all pretty darned inspired and actually kind of moving. It's obviously not anything that Rimsky-Korsakov would have intended, but it does not, it seems to me clash with the work itself. It seems to complement it very well, and there's nothing there that makes nonsense of the libretto, as oft happens in these reinterpretations.
Well, I say that, but unfortunately, it all kind of implodes in the last act, which takes place in the "real" world, and the on-stage action just makes less and less sense in the context of the piece. Even so, though, I think this probably could have been at least somewhat acceptable, except for the ending: it's meant to be triumphant and joyful, but for whatever fucking reason, the director (Dmitri Tcherniakov, who is apparently notorious for this sort of thing) decided that we needed a downbeat conclusion, so we end with Gvidon just not being able to deal with all the noise and commotion frantically clawing at the back wall. This doesn't work with the music or libretto or really ANYTHING about the opera, and it really downgrades the whole thing.
It kind of makes me angry--I hope to see a traditional production in the future, because the opera itself rules--but my anger is as nothing compared to that of a number of irate Russians in the youtube comments section. Some of them rant at length in Russian, but there are a few comments in English, such as:
"Wonderful music and wonderful execution, what a pity that the director has destroyed everything with his madness."
and
"To a Russian person to see this and listen to this disgusting singing with disgusting diction is simply unbearable and humiliating!"
and my favorite:
"There is no Russian opera left that the bastard dog Dima Chernyakov would not have marked with the fetid urine of his talent."
"The fetid urine of his talent." Okay you don't like the production, fair enough. It is just very, very hard for me to imagine unironically making comments like these. It's definitely a nationalism thing, and obviously nationalism is real, but I just cannot conceive of being prompted to write things like this as a reaction to any sort of perceived degradation of an American culural artifact. Probably chilling out a bit would be a good thing to do.
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