The Queen of Spades, Garsington: Romantic despair and mad obsession – with a strong whiff of sulphur
For the opera's bitter anti-hero Herman the way to that secret lies through the Countess's niece Lisa. But perhaps love for her will rescue him from his mad obsession? That's the intimate heart of the opera, but as this fabulous new production makes clear the story is rooted in the tensions of Russian society.
Director Jack Furness and designer Tom Piper summon that world's luxuriant, telling detail as well as its huge epic sweep and barely concealed brutality. In the barracks at the very beginning we see some lads playing soldiers. It's charming, and the excellent Garsington Opera Children's Chorus savour the Russian words. But when one of them falls down the others give his head a good kicking.
Later, when we see Herman explaining his infatuation with the socially unattainable Lisa to his good friend Tomsky, he gets contemptuous looks from the strolling St Petersburg high society, who admire themselves in the mottled mirrored detachable walls that make up the set. These spin round to reveal previously hidden worlds. It might be the make-believe of a Rococo theatre-in-a-theatre, or the grim cramped barracks where Herman dreams his dream of infinite wealth.
This picturesque but fundamentally grim world is enlivened by the dancers in the ball scenes and above all by Garsington's lavish 32-strong chorus, breathtakingly vigorous whether they're playing eager gamblers round the gambling-table or the Countess's chattering servants. Tchaikovsky's blazing score, which ranges from Mozartian pastiche to Russian charm to the tremor and shriek of the supernatural is brought to vivid life by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Garsington's musical director Douglas Boyd.
However the couple at the opera's heart are not quite so strong. Laura Wilde as Lisa has an impressive flaring voice but her performance felt rather dramatically tepid, and though Aaron Cawley's dark-grained baritone seemed right for Herman's obsession one missed a sense of that countervailing tenderness for Lisa that might have saved him.
The circle of army friends around Herman were more convincingly portrayed, above all gravel-voiced Robert Hayward as the jovial, ever-optimistic Tomsky. Roderick Williams as the stuffed-shirt Prince Yelestsky who loses out to the romantically fascinating Herman provided the subtlest singing of the performance, in his aria of dignified heartbreak.
However the evening's most spell-binding moment came from Diana Montague as the Countess, alone in her bedroom, recalling her young days in Paris when she learned the secret of the 'three cards'. On opening night, when the lights fell and the orchestral sound dropped to a whisper, you could feel everyone lean forward to catch the old witch's secrets. Sometimes the best moments at the opera are the quietest.
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The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Kept fighting despite the odds': the Russian journalists who risked everything to report the truth
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Loktev tells us so in the opening minutes of this astonishing five-hour film (now playing in theaters, with a break between chapters 1-3 and 4-5): 'The world you are about to see no longer exists,' she says over footage of bright storefronts in Moscow. 'None of us knew what was about to happen.' In February 2022, four months after Loktev started filming, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a shock even to the clear-eyed journalists who had reported on Putin's mobilization of troops in the days and weeks prior. Within a week, much of the country's civil society and independent press fled. The first chapter of My Undesirable Friends, filmed in October 2021, ends with a chilling note: every person you just saw now lives in exile. Much of My Undesirable Friends thus plays out like a thriller, with characters trying to figure out their next move with what we know to be limited time. On some level, they know it, too, even if they do not yet believe it. 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The two podcast hosts overlap with Ksenia Mironova, a fellow journalist whose fiance, Ivan Safronov, was indefinitely jailed on trumped-up charges after he investigated Russian defense contracts. (Safronov was sentenced to 22 years in prison in September 2022, a sham verdict meant to threaten journalists.) Mironova calmly recounts how the authorities upended their apartment in the raid that took Safronov away – a terrifying possibility within a dark range of common intimidation tactics. 'Some of our characters have been searched, some of their places were bugged,' said Loktev. 'They were constantly afraid of when they would have to leave, or when they would have to stop working or worse, when they would be arrested.' Nevertheless, they keep working. Mironova keeps reporting, even as she breaks when sending care packages to Safronov that will almost certainly never reach him. So do Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya, even after their studio is bugged and they lose their rare trial contesting the foreign agents label. So does Elena Kostyuchenko, an exceptionally daring reporter for the storied investigative outlet Novaya Gazeta, even after several of her colleagues have been killed; at the outset of the invasion, she manages to slip into Ukraine. So does Nemzer, the host of a short-lived TV Rain program called Who's Got the Power? on civil society leaders, even as the noose tightens on free speech in the country. Just before going on air with her university thesis adviser to talk about the detention of her parents' friend, an academic also designated a 'foreign agent', Nemzer reflects on the surreality of the collapse in real time: 'It's this constant attempt, on one hand, not to panic or become hysterical – everything is OK, everything is OK. On the other hand, you can't allow yourself to get used to this.' 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My Undesirable Friends will show at Film Forum in New York City from 15 August with a UK date to be announced This article was amended on 15 August 2025. A previous version erroneously stated that Ivan Safronov was sentenced to 24 years in prison. He was sentenced to 22 years.
The Independent
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Piers Morgan quickly backtracks after ‘mistakenly' posting photo of Trump wearing kneepads ahead of Putin summit
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The Independent
10 hours ago
- The Independent
Bayreuth's 2025 production of Wagner's 'Meistersinger' features a Technicolor look — and a twist
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