Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

We've all gone to heaven

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • We've all gone to heaven

    SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
    February 27, 2005, Sunday

    We've all gone to heaven

    By Peter Reed

    BODY:
    People still speak in hushed tones of the Kirov Opera's performance
    of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and
    the Maiden Fevroniya at the Barbican in 1994. If it was anything like
    last Wednesday's given by the same forces (now called the Mariinsky
    Theatre) and again conducted by the Mariinsky's director, Valery
    Gergiev, I can understand why. The impact it made is all the more
    remarkable when you consider that this conflation and interpretation
    of two medieval Russian fables is not without flaws.

    Its epic historical scale lacks dramatic focus - you think that the
    "pilgrim's progress" of saintly Fevroniya is at the centre of things,
    but Kuterma, the grotesque and drunken idiot-savant, is far more
    powerfully drawn. The love between Fevroniya and her prince,
    initiated in Act I, is then virtually ignored until the last act, by
    which time they're both dead in the now celestial city of Kitezh. The
    influence of Wagner - not for nothing is the work known as "the
    Russian Parsifal" - is all over the score like a rash; and when it
    isn't the music is dominated by those characteristically Russian
    folk- and hymn-style melodies that always seem to be looping back to
    where they started.

    The reason it works, of course, is that the Mariinsky performs it
    with such conviction. Kitezh is in their blood and, with the
    exception of the two main roles - a steady and radiant Fevroniya from
    Tatiana Borodina (standing in for Mlada Khudolei) and Vassily
    Gorshkov's strident and demented Kuterma - in their heads: the other
    13 soloists sang from memory. These included Lyubov Sokolova and Olga
    Trifonova's expressive two birds of paradise, who announce
    Fevroniya's death and lead her into the heavenly city, and Gennady
    Bezzubenkov as Prince Yuri, sonorous and moving in his prayer for the
    city's deliverance from the Tartar hordes.

    This sense of cohesion was firmly grounded in the grandeur of the
    chorus's singing and by the orchestra's hyper-responsive playing,
    which under Gergiev's fairly minimal direction illuminated the
    music's visionary and narrative detail. One moment it was like
    viewing one of those huge sombre Russian landscapes, the next like
    contemplating an icon. Gergiev presented us with a rock-solid fusion
    of style and content, and the result was both remarkable and
    humbling.

    The following night the Mariinsky chorus reasserted the authority of
    their disciplined, flexible singing in a short concert of Russian
    church music in the warm and very comfortable Armenian church of St
    Yeghiche in south Kensington. The music included some lovely extracts
    from vespers by Kalinnikov and Rachmaninov; Bezzubenkov was the
    soloist in a magnificently gloomy Litany of Supplication by
    Grechaninov; and I very much liked Arkhangelsky's concerto for chorus
    "I Think of the Dies Irae" - you and me both, all the time.
Working...
X