| The season at the Mariinsky Theater opened with Mazepa Director Yuri Alexandrov (he, like set designer Georgy Tsypin, has made many performances for the Mariinsky Theater, but this is the first time they have worked together) has an amazing gift for turning everything he touches into something comical, which is why he is best at buffets and operettas. In the opera-dramas, Alexander’s comedy takes on a guignol shade, and in the most tragic places the audience does not know whether to cry or laugh—in Semyon Kotko, in the massacre scene, the Germans will appear in space suits, pouring flamethrowers and water cannons on the scene, then the story “ The Scoldings of Lucretia” is narrated not by an ancient choir, but by a Jew with a golden fixa who fled from the ghetto, then in “Mazeppa” Maria, who has gone crazy, carries pieces of the body of her executed father in a bag. And it’s always like this - revelations mixed with trash. It seems that under the high voltage of Alexander’s imagination all the fuses of taste are flying. And not only the director.
Mazeppa was offered to Valery Gergiev by the Metropolitan Opera (it premiered in New York in March). So, when Georgy Tsypin showed the first models to the customers, a scandal broke out - the directors of the Met did not expect that the key words in Tchaikovsky’s opera would be “denunciation”, “torture”, “execution”, and from them the “cult of personality” would be derived. Hetman Generalissimo.
In an interview, Tsypin admitted that he was even glad to redo the layouts, banish politics as much as possible and make the story timeless. They say that the struggle for power is always the same - both 300 years ago and 70 - and everything repeats itself: revenge gives birth to revenge, former friends become executioners and then victims, the Moloch of history indifferently grinds people's destinies. What was the sun in the first act will turn into blood, and in the finale it will become ashes. Maybe for the Americans this plot has become abstract, a kind of native “exotic adventure” (Financial Times), but for the domestic viewer the politics has not gone away, everything is unambiguous, although the profile of the leader in the background is equipped not only with a pipe, but also with a donkey.
Alexandrov’s performances are always a farce, but the doses of kitsch in Mazepa are close to lethal. The point is not that the action was transferred to another era - Kochubey’s estate turned into VDNKh with fattened cattle and happy gilded peasants, sorry, collective farmers from the Fountain of Friendship of Peoples. Then these revived plaster figures will turn into dust and dust, and the proud, arrogant Cossacks, on the contrary, will be petrified forever. It's not the ideas that are vulgar, they are breathtaking, it's the final result that is vulgar - the director is at his wit's end again. If jealousy - then let Maria find the stocking of Mazepov's passion and shake it in front of her beloved's nose, if dreams of power - then Monomakh's hat is prepared in the cabinet, if execution - then complete dismemberment, plaster heads roll like balls, and if madness - then constructing a baby from human stumps. The director is passionate about super ideas, conceptual rethinking of the whole, he rearranges the accents, but at the same time the actors move clumsily, do not know what to do with themselves, stiltedly raise their arms and clumsily fall on their faces. And the big romantic opera, which they probably wanted to give an extremely modern sound, looks like the worst parody of itself.
Tchaikovsky, after all, is also uneven in Mazeppa, revelation scenes are interspersed with passable mid-opera pages, but Gergiev passionately extracts the maximum possible from the score. In lyrical duets he carefully cultivates every orchestral echo, in the execution scene he incinerates with contrasting dynamics, in the noisy “Battle of Poltava” there is not only rapture, but also despair. And the lullaby with which the opera ends turns into some kind of exhausting psychedelic trip that makes the audience forget that the metro will be closed in 20 minutes. But if for Gergiev “Mazeppa” is a four-hour poem about feelings, then for Alexandrov it is just an excuse for performance.
The consequences are obvious: as powerful and harmonious as the choir sounded (choirmaster Leonid Teplyakov), they played absurdly and pathetically. For many years, Nikolai Putilin considered the role of Mazepa his signature role, but this time he sounded paler than Edem Umerov, who sang the second performance. Larisa Dyadkova, Kochubey’s wife with experience, was still convincing both acting and vocally; it’s better not to compare her understudy Elena Vitman with her. Viktor Lutsyuk and Oleg Balashov sounded decent as Andrey. Maria was diligently sung by Tatyana Pavlovskaya and Victoria Yastrebova, although those who heard Olga Guryakova in this part lacked the flexibility of intonation.
Of the two “Mazepas” now available in the Mariinsky repertoire, the new performance looks, of course, more avant-garde than the dusty production of 1950, where everything is realistic and grounded. But, despite the provocative decor and ideological superstructure, he was not far from it. Anna PETROVA (St. Petersburg) |
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