5/1/2016
Opera: Your country needs you | The Sunday Times
Opera: Your country needs you
The Bolshoi's Fiery Angel is
a triumph, but Hugh
Canning is in revolt over the
other Russian offerings on
show
Meanwhile, Valery Gergiev’s Mariinsky/Kirov company
(relegated this year to the Coliseum because of repertoire
clashes with the ROH programme) offered a Shostakovich
mini-fest for the composer’s centenary year, comprising all
three of his sung music-theatre pieces — The Nose, Katerina
Izmaylova (the revised, expurgated version of Lady Macbeth of
the Mtsensk District) and his musical comedy, Moscow,
Cheryomushki — and three ballet programmes.
Published: 30 July 2006
Not to be outdone, the Bolshoi ballet, arriving this week,
programmes Shostakovich’s The Limpid (or Bright) Stream alongside such classics as Swan Lake and
Don Quixote.
If Gergiev hoped to steal the Bolshoi’s thunder — this is the Moscow-based opera company’s first visit
to Covent Garden — he reckoned without the consistency and discipline of the Bolshoi ensemble and
the conviction of Zambello’s staging of Prokofiev’s most powerful and controversial stage work. The
Fiery Angel is the study of a dual obsession: the visionary Renata, with a lover, Count Heinrich, who
has abandoned her and with whom she identifies the fiery guardian angel about whom she
hallucinates; and of Ruprecht with Renata. He pursues her, but she repels him, until he is wounded in
a duel with Heinrich. Deciding that her relationship with Ruprecht would be sinful, she enters a
convent, where her demons disrupt the peace of the nuns and provoke mass hysteria. The Inquisitor
condemns her to the stake, where she embraces her fiery angel and ascends to heaven.
Prokofiev wrote his opera in 1927, but it was never staged in his lifetime. When he returned to a
Soviet Union convulsed by its own artistic witch-hunts in the 1930s, the subject matter was clearly
too provocative to reach the stage there. Its orchestral and vocal demands are as terrifying as its
subject, but the Bolshoi fields a fearless Renata, one of opera’s most notorious killer roles, in the
soprano Tatiana Smirnova, as energetic an actress as she is a tireless singer; and a fine Ruprecht in
Boris Statsenko, with excellent support from Evgenia Segenyuk (Fortune Teller), Maxim Paster
(Mephistopheles), and Elena Novak (Mother Superior), and virtuoso playing from the Bolshoi
orchestra under its music director, Alexander Vedernikov.
The Fiery Angel was last seen in the UK in a co-production with the Kirov at Covent Garden in the
mid-1990s, while Betrothal in a Monastery has not been staged professionally in this country
during my opera-going lifetime. If the deadly new Glyndebourne staging is anything to go by, it won’t
need to be staged again in the near future. Glyndebourne has a Russian-born music director, the
outstanding Vladimir Jurowski, who has declared his intention to bring neglected Russian operas
into the repertory. Two years ago, he programmed Rachmaninov’s The Miserly Knight, which was
worth hearing once, and now he dishes up the Prokofiev, which, unfortunately, isn’t even that.
Musically wafer-thin and uninspired, Betrothal, based on Sheridan’s “operetta” The Duenna, dates
from the troubled period when both Prokofiev and Shostakovich were in the bad books of their Soviet
masters. Shostakovich avoided trouble by retreating into “abstract” music and withholding
potentially controversial material, while Prokofiev chose patriotic (War and Peace) or innocuous
subjects (Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, The Duenna) for his theatre works. Betrothal’s stock
commedia dell’arte yarn — of two pairs of lovers prevented from marrying by stupid old people with
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5/1/2016
Opera: Your country needs you | The Sunday Times
other plans — clearly didn’t provide the theatrical meat that Prokofiev craved, although his busy, only
intermittently tuneful score proved popular. It was, reputedly, one of Stalin’s favourites, and after
experiencing the Glyndebourne production, I can well believe it: a torturer’s idea of a fun evening in
the theatre.
Jurowski conducts the score with evangelical zeal, without disguising its longueurs and paucity of
memorable melodic ideas — you sense Prokofiev knew it, too, as he repeats the theme of Antonio’s
Serenade and Don Jerome’s Minuet ad nauseam — and the singing is modest by Glyndebourne
standards: Lyubov Petrova is a charming but shrill Louisa, Vsevolod Grivnov and Andrei Breus
anodyne as the young male lovers, while Viacheslav Voynarovsky, Sergei Alexashkin and Alexandra
Durseneva offer Kirov-style routine and hopeless acting as Don Jerome, the fishmonger Mendoza,
and the Duenna. The outstanding performance comes from the delectable Georgian mezzo Nino
Surguladze as Donna Clara, the fugitive who takes refuge in the monastery of the title.
The real killer, though, is Daniel Slater’s flat, cliché-ridden staging in Robert Innes Hopkins’s hideous
1950s retro sets and costumes (supposedly based on Goya, but looking as if they had fallen off the
touring van of a company taking The School for Scandal round the provinces half a century ago). A
wonky false proscenium framing the main action puts the entire enterprise in inverted commas and
screams disbelief in the work. The comedy routines are desperately unfunny, with superfluous
harlequinade characters and a refugee Bottom-as-ass from A Midsummer Night’s Dream constantly
upstaging the principals with meaningless business. In the history of Glyndebourne lows, this comes
close to rock bottom.
The Mariinsky/Kirov Opera, alas, makes no stronger a case for Shostakovich: unremarkable,
tired-sounding singers now take the leading roles in Gergiev’s overworked company, and, with the
exception of the charming semi-staging of Cheryomushki (by Vasily Barkhatov), production values
have not moved on greatly since the theatrical rigor mortis of the late communist period. The Nose’s
anarchic satire hardly registered in Yury Alexandrov’s would-be modernist but shambolic staging,
and London’s houses both have stagings of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk vastly superior to this lame,
conventional effort, stridently sung and clunkily acted by Larissa Gogolevskaya (Katerina), Victor
Lutsiuk (Sergei) and a worn-sounding Alexashkin (singing Boris the night after his Mendoza at
Glyndebourne). Gergiev really has a cheek, foisting such provincial tat on Shostakovich fans here with
memories still fresh of David Pountney’s and Richard Jones’s thrilling ENO and Royal Opera
productions of the original version. The orchestra played well, if occasionally coarsely, and there were
moments of pathos in the final scene of Katerina’s betrayal and suicide, but they were thanks to
Shostakovich’s searingly painful music, rather than the mediocre performance. I have written it
before, but it is worth repeating: London needs a long break from Gergiev and the Mariinsky/Kirov
Opera.
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