Everything was mixed in the house of Pokrovsky

The situation in the Pokrovsky Theater is as follows.Mikhail Kislyarova , despite some noise, was not returned there, his position of the chief director was abolished, but since June, the artistic director of the opera troupe appeared (there was no other in this theater) - the director with solid experience Olga Ivanova. She is well known here, she has already staged several performances in the Pokrovsky Theater, and now another one - Rossini’s opera “Turks in Italy”.

The musical director of the theater, Gennady Nikolaevich Rozhdestvensky, declared for the premiere performance, as usual, after the hall sat down and subsided, appeared from the side door of the stalls, regally accepted applause, but did not go to the hole. Together with his wife Victoria Postnikova, he settled in the audience as close as possible to the conductor's place in which his young assistant Alexei Vereshchagin was discovered.

I must say right away: Vereshchagin held the performance very worthy. Solo instruments in the orchestra were not always impeccable, but the main thing is that all the gear of the cunning and on the ear of a very frivolous Rossinievsky sound mechanism spinned properly, the endless series of complex vocal ensembles was built into a tightened line, and some of them - for example, a magnificent acapel receipt from the second action - can be called victory. The entire composition of the soloists kept confidently (albeit with different degrees of approaching the Italian language), but Ekaterina Ferzba (Ferillal) with a pure and flexible voice was particularly joy.

The opera “Turks in Italy”, written in 1814, was a certain answer of the composer of his own “Italian in Algeria”, which appeared a year earlier. And also - which is much more significant - Mozart opera. The shadows from the “Wedding of Figaro”, “This is what all women do” and even “Don Juan” flicker especially clearly in the second action, where there is a scene of a carnival, and sadness and seriousness appear through the continuous comician. And Vereshchagin managed not to lose them.

Like most of those 39 operas of Rossini, which are not the “Seville barber” and “Cinderella”, this one in Russia is almost unknown. So the Pokrovsky Theater, even taking up the famous composer name, remained faithful to its principle of repertoire exclusive. Retelling the plot “Turk in Italy” is almost an unbearable task. He is incredibly confused, and Olga Ivanova did not unravel him. Rather, on the contrary. Love ups and downs with dressings, unrecognizations, jealousy, fidelity, betrayal and happy reconciliation, over which Rossini and his librettist Feliche Romani also added a completely postmodern story about the playwright, looking for an intrigue for a new play, the director of the Moscow performance was placed on the set. On which the inscription “The shooting is on,” does not burn. So life and acting finally mixed up. Well, okay.

The performance simply bursts from a continuous series of gags, the jokes are often rude and rustic, filling the scene of the Italian columns resembles a Turkish hotel, the red-white-black gamut of costumes (artist Viktor Gerasimenko) is annoying for three hours of order. But life on the stage is seething in earnest, sometimes reaching a quite cheerful boiling point-for example, when, during a virtuoso duet, the bass ruddle Selim (Cyril Filin) ​​and Jeronio (Alexei Prokopyev) measure their sporting successes with each other.

In short, it cannot be said that with the abolition of the position of the chief director, the performances of the theater ceased to be directorial. However, the most pretty - that the season of squabbles and shocks ends with a good musical result.