Nabucco

Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Director Mikhail Kislyarov
Bolshoi Theater of Russia
Moscow

(Photo: Igor Zakharkin )

Having written an opera about how the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (in Italian - Nabucco), who imagined himself to be a god, paid with his sanity and almost destroyed an entire people, Verdi opened a new direction in musical theater and was recognized as the first composer of Italy. And the Va penciero chorus from the third act of Nabucco became the unofficial national anthem.

The idea of ​​staging this opera at the Bolshoi on the 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death is all the more impressive since Nabucco appeared on the Russian stage only once - in 1851 in St. Petersburg. However, the production was conceived by the former, recently displaced rulers of the Bolshoi, who imagined themselves to be his personification, but sometimes acted contrary to the creative laws of the theater.

They did not bother with the fact that, in addition to the choir and orchestra, who can freely cope with the music of the opera under the direction of Mark Ermler, they also need soloists capable of performing virtuoso grueling parts. They were not surprised by the fact that Sergei Barkhin, who creates magnificent playing spaces in dramatic performances, for some reason does not use this gift on the Bolshoi stage. He came up with a constructivist outline of the Tower of Babel on the backdrop and four movable panels with slots in the form of letters of the ancient alphabet. The result is something like a bookplate, which is impressive at first, but has nothing to do with musical dramaturgy.

For some reason, the metal decorations, drowning out the music with a grinding sound (they say they almost broke the floor), were ordered from space technology specialists at the Khrunichev Center. To “play out” the structures, they invited athletes from the “Four Winds” club to scurry up and down the stairs. And as the director they chose Mikhail Kislyarov, a former actor of the Central Children's Theater and an extra at the Bolshoi Theater, who six months ago ruined the production of "Mermaid" on its stage. In "Nabucco" Kislyarov mixed the stomping, gesturing and marching of a children's skit with the convulsions of a teenage disco.