Excellent! This is both my first Kazakh opera and my first opera from a -stan country. How many people have seen operas in more languages than I have, I wonder? Probably not that many, I bet. Still, I'd like to meet them. They could probably give me some good tips.
There are several performances online; you can easily find them. The wikipedia entry's plot synopsis is thin, but there's a fuller one (albeit somewhat syntactically odd) here, from when the Mariinsky was putting it on. Look, let's cut to the chase: the title characters are singers. They're in love, but unfortunately, Sara is supposed to be married to Zhetysu, the chief Zhanbota's hunchbacked brother. And there's also Altynai, another woman, who is unrequitedly in love with Birzhan.
Well, the marriage ceremony is going to proceed; what can one do? Birzhan appears on the scene to try to stop it, but the jealous Altynai alerts the guards and Birzhan is captured. What happens next isn't one hundred percent clear. The wikipedia entry claims that Altynai stabs Sara, leaving Birzhan bereft, but then asserts that "under different variants, Birzhan might die instead of Sara. The one that I saw must be a different variant, in that case: here, we see Birzhan's allies overpower the guard and rescue him, but then, he dies. Just because, it looks like. Where is Sara in all this? Unclear.
At least in the version I saw, the drama seems a little mushy (should I complain about an unsubtitled piece where I don't speak the language? "Should" got nothing to do with it). This Altynai character: she may stab Sara in the original version, but here she doesn't do much of anything. I'll be generous and just assume that the libretto states that she calls the guards, because it's not apparent from the action, but even if she does do that, it's all she does: after that she just vanishes. Apparently there's a thing earlier where she lies to Sara and tells her that Birzhan's gone mad, but that's not really anything, since he just appears soon enough anyway to instantly debunk that. It just seems like she should be doing more than she does. Same for the two Z-villains.
I do like the music though, quite a lot. In particular, there are some country dances for the planned wedding that bang really hard. Definitely better than many an opera that I see just for the novelty of the language. Anyway, my quest to see one from every former Soviet Socialist Republic seems to be not on hold: I've got Russia (obviously), Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and now Kazakhstan. Also, I saw that Romanian Puss in Boots, and Romanian is the same language as Moldovan, but I feel it's really not fair to count it if it's not actual from Moldova, dangit. Still, time will tell! I'll bet I'll be able to check off some more soon enough.
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