Shades of Silence

Rodion Shchedrin’s opera “The Enchanted Wanderer” was performed in Moscow

A person unfamiliar with the essence of the subject hears something autobiographical in the title of Shchedrin’s “Enchanted Wanderer”: Shchedrin is a wanderer himself, in his rare visits to Moscow he brings some kind of otherworldly charm, and his music, so Russian in spirit, nevertheless, it could not have been written here, in this thoroughly noisy and bustling metropolis. It came from a completely different time and space, and if you remember how many Russian writers (poets, composers) created their main, key works outside the space of Russia, then much in Shchedrin’s work becomes clearer and more obvious. “The Enchanted Wanderer” is firmly included in this anthology of Russian and at the same time non-Russian opuses: the opera was created in 2002 by order of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and was immediately and with great success played there, in New York, and not in Russia It would have taken a long time to get there if it weren’t for Valery Gergiev and his interest in contemporary Russian authors. This summer “The Wanderer” was played in St. Petersburg, and at the Mariinsky Theater they even joked about the fact that such good music is an amazing thing! -- belongs to the author, who is alive and feeling great. The resonance generated by the opera in St. Petersburg was enormous, and Gergiev immediately took it to Moscow - the concert, held last Sunday in the Tchaikovsky Hall, was the beginning of a philharmonic festival dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Rodion Shchedrin.

Resumed from one rehearsal, as often happens at the Mariinsky Theater with its sprinting pace, “The Wanderer” is firmly connected in the mind with another Shchedrin opus, performed in Moscow a year ago - the choral opera “Boyarina Morozova”. In both cases, from the first bars we are plunged headlong into history - an ephemeral world of sounds that contains several centuries from medieval choral asceticism to the harmonic breaks of the 20th century, from the burning nostalgia of Russian romanticism to the Prokofievian grotesque. Shchedrin does not play with styles, like the epigones of postmodernism; the entire sound world of his predecessors is assimilated into his music in a surprisingly harmonious way, and Shchedrin’s own style, recognizable and embossed, grows through it. How does “The Wanderer” differ from “Boyarina Morozova” - a convex, absolutely operatic plot based on the story by Nikolai Leskov, where carnal love and spiritual love, passion, jealousy and inescapable Russian melancholy are linked together. However, here, too, one can feel the specificity of the narrative, which gravitates not to a unilinear plot, but to the genre of hagiography - storylines unfold slowly, replace one another, the protagonists change their images to faceless parts of Storytellers, the same voice is capable of embodying several different characters . In the life story of the novice of the Valaam Monastery Ivan Severyanovich Flyagin, in which the central experience was love for the gypsy Grusha, who fell in love not with him, but with the frivolous Prince and then begged Flyagin to kill her, Shchedrin avoids traditional operatic moves. There are no extended cavatinas or sweet love duets here, but there is an incredibly beautiful sound continuum in which vocal and choral voices are intertwined, subdued by a thousand different orchestral timbres from soul-tearing shepherd oboe tunes to laconic gusli, gentle recorders and, as always with Shchedrin, brilliant drummers. What was also amazing in “The Wanderer” was the countless shades of silence - fading, lulling, oppressive, terrifying, brooding: Shchedrin belongs to those few authors who know how to construct music not only from notes, but also from pauses.

Valery Gergiev mastered this art of silence with impressive skill. Of course, in the episode of the main character’s torture at the stake, in a colorful orchestral interlude with the sirens of steamships on the Volga, the St. Petersburg copper and invincible strike group again showed themselves, but on the whole the Mariinsky Orchestra demonstrated what it was sometimes denied in the past - the ability to listen , to capture the slightest gradations of nuances, the art of combining timbres. The choir under the direction of Andrei Petrenko did an outstanding job, instantly transforming from a strictly church choir of novices into a daring band of gypsies. In the role of Grusha, the extraordinary talent of the young Mariinsky soloist Kristina Kapustinskaya was revealed, whose expressive mezzo conjured and bewitched in gypsy melodies; Alexander Timchenko showed himself to be a hero, having learned the most difficult tenor part in three days instead of the sick Evgeniy Akimov. At first hovering in the ethereal heights, his role began to sound more full and dense, seducing the tenor voice. The main character performed by Sergei Aleksashkin looked a little less interesting (probably due to the protracted rehearsal), who lacked vocal colors and clarity in Leskov’s colorful verses. In general, the eighty minutes of “The Wanderer” once again made one marvel at the mastery of Shchedrin’s handwriting and the unobtrusiveness of his style - there are so many sharp points and questions hanging in the air in the opera that it leaves a long aftertaste and continues to resound in the mind after all the applause and official speeches died down. This is probably the distinguishing feature of real, undying music.

Mikhail FIKHTENGOLTS