Samovar

"Golden Mask" celebrated its anniversary

In honor of its fifteenth anniversary on Saturday evening, “Mask” gathered the public, participants and laureates for a ceremony where the awards “For Honor and Dignity” (critic Inna Solovyova), “For Support of Theater Arts” (Governor of the Khanty-Mansiysk Okrug Alexander Filippenko) were awarded and the Kommersant Publishing House) and “For the best foreign performance shown in Russia in 2008” (“Ivanov” by the Hungarian theater József Katona). The main part was the presentation of the one-act opera “Golden”, specially written for the celebration, by composer Alexander Manotskov. Idea and production by Andrey Moguchy and Dmitry Krymov.

The very fact that the Golden Mask ordered an anniversary performance, and to authors who are reputable in the field of modern theater, evokes respect. For the first time in 15 years, “Mask” not only evaluates and shapes the theatrical process, but also directly participates in it. The concept of the performance looks no less beautiful: an opera (as the main synthetic genre in history) based on the fairy tales “Kolobok”, “Golden Fish” and “Ryaba Hen” (here - like the golden sand of the local cultural subconscious). The implementation of the idea intricately mixes serious theater, primitivist acting and the cheerful gait of a skit. On the proscenium are the Bolshoi Theater choir, the choir of the School of Dramatic Art, Bolshoi soloists Maxim Pasteur, Nikolai Kazansky, Valery Gilmanov, as well as countertenor Rustam Yavaev, folklorist and avant-garde artist Tina Georgievskaya, the author of the music in the role of Grandfather, and actress-singer Anna Sinyakina. Funny and terrible huge cardboard, straw, wooden, paper and other dolls move across the stage, led by people in tailcoats (and sometimes also wearing earflaps). But first, the famous theater figure Anatoly Smelyansky comes to the front of the stage, shaking the author’s hand along the way, and, slightly stuttering, very seriously reads from a piece of paper: “Scene one. Grandfather and Baba." Then there will be, for example, such: “Meeting with the Hare”, “Bear”, “Meeting with the Fox. The Death of the Kolobok", "Ryaba the Hen. Apocalypse and Finale." The countertenor will first sing “And it rolled…”, thereby setting an evangelical intonation and referring to the genre of passions. And to replace a huge woman with a tiny grandfather with an exaggerated phallus (well, of course, “Kolobok” is about the secrets of birth, life and death; and “Ryaba” is about the same thing) will come a phallic Hare, a Wolf, similar to a crocodile (yeah , bun - the sun), a bear from an ancient toy the size of the entire stage. And from the beak of the Church Hen the Golden Egg of creativity will fall out. And the countertenor will sing “Don't Cry” at the end. The music jumps from Sviridov to Shostakovich (“invasion theme”), from Bach to Mozart, from the ancient sequence Dies Irae to neo-folklore and minimalism. Straightforward musical leaps (played by the Helikon Opera orchestra under the direction of Vladimir Ponkin) overload the performance so that it tilts towards the skit. The stage story is more elegant and lighter than the musical story. Cute and verbose, but the project eventually became an anniversary theatrical skit, albeit in a modern style.

Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev made an equally strong impression with his speech when he presented the award “For Support of Theatrical Art” to the Kommersant Publishing House, which, in the words of the minister, “will forever remain with the theater.” “You have good reviews. You also write good poetry. And you will have even more culture now, since you are acquiring the Ogonyok magazine,” Avdeev told Kommersant CEO Demyan Kudryavtsev, who received the award. The official’s main thought was the idea that “The greatness of Russia lies in the greatness of its culture.” And you can't argue with that.

Yulia BEDEROVA