Vitaliy Hubarenko, The Reluctant Matchmaker (1985)

Okay, so this is a thing: usually when I watch an opera with only a summary I can nonetheless basically make sense of what's going on.  Not so much in this case.  I spent a lot of time and effort looking for information about this, but there ain't much online--and that includes the Ukrainian- and Russian-language internets.  Finally, I sort of figured it out: the video as it appears on operaonvideo is from mail.ru, and there's no summary.  But there IS a version of the same video on youtube that includes a summary in the description; the reason I didn't find it initially is because, while you can easily search for it on youtube, if you just do a google search and click on "videos," you only get the first version.  But even with that description...I had a hell of a time making head or tail of this.  It has a standard opera buffa plot: Pazinka's parents want her to marry a rich guy, but she's in love with a soldier, Skvortsov, and it's up to his clever batman Shelmenko to carry off the match.  But it took me almost the whole runtime for me to even figure out who was who, let alone the intricacies of the plot, which apparently involve mistaken identity stuff.

Well, for the record, in case anyone wants to watch it: the woman in the yellow dress is Pazinka, obviously.  The bearded and beardless soldiers are Skvortsov and Shelmenko respectively.  I don't know who the gray-haired guy who looks vaguely like Henry Winkler is, so don't ask.   Pazinka's father?  Possibly.  The woman in the red dress who punctuates her dialogue with words and short phrases in French is, I think, her sister.  The older blonde is, naturally, their mother.  And the Willy-Wonka/Mad-Hatter-looking dude in orange is Pazinka's family's preferred suitor.  I think.

Well, I definitely think a better understanding of what the heck was going on would've helped, but still, it's not bad.  Quite varied music, with some of it harkening back to the nineteenth century with elements of romanticism (also, a few patter songs), but also some more modern material with very mild elements of serialism.  Some of it just faded into the background, but overall, it's a pretty okay piece of work.  Still, without subtitles, I don't know that I'm capable of providing a really fair review, so we'll leave it at that.