Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, May Night (1880)

Here's an early Rimsky-Korsakov piece. Does that mean it's not as "sophisticated" as later works? Possibly, but it's hard to imagine a situation where listening to a few hours of NRK would be anything less than pleasant.

It's based on a Gogol story and takes place in small village. The mayor's son Levko is in love with Hanna, but his dad also has ambitions to marry her (creepy in theory, but he's too much of a buffoon to be taken seriously). Levko tells Hanna story about a woman who lived in the village some time in the past whose stepmother turned out to be a witch and made her father drive her away such that she committed suicide by drowning herself in the pond, and now she lives with the other drowned maidens (rusalki). Later the witch was drowned to, but the stepdaughter doesn't know which one she is and needs someone to tell her so she can get revenge. I wonder why we are getting this extremely specific story? There is no way to know. Anyway, in the end, Levko points out the witch, and in gratitude, the drowned girl gives him a letter purporting to be from the commissar ordering his dad to let him marry Hanna. So he does.

That's the plot, but it's definitely not a tightly-plotted piece. The entire second act consists entirely of the mayor and his friends drinking and mucking about. That's fine, though, because the music--if perhaps lacking the high point of later NRK operas--is still very good. I must say, though, that this DVD suffers from poor audio and video quality--not excusable from a performance recorded in 2008. The image is very muddy, and there's audible feedback along with somewhat muted, distant music--and given that I'm not an audiophile and often don't even know what people are complaining about when they make criticisms like this, you know there must be issues. You get used to it, kind of, but a better recording would have made a world of difference.

Still worth seeing, even under suboptimal circumstance. Here are the Rimsky-Korsakov operas I have seen: May Night, Mlada, Sadko, Mozart and Salieri, The Tsar's Bride, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Kaschey the Deathless, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, The Golden Cockerel. Not bad, but alas, these are I believe the only ones available on video in any way. His Snow Maiden was apparently his favorite of his operas, but can you see it? You sure can't! Sure, I've listened to bits of it, and it's great! But it's an opera! I want to see it! Dernit. I wish Operavision would swoop in to our rescue.