Latest news with #Khovanshchina
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Opera Companies Team Up, Everybody Wins
Simon McBurney's acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky's 'Khovanshchina,' which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn't happen. McBurney's staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions. At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney's 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. 'For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,' he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg's picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of 'Khovanshchina' at the festival, on April 21. 'Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it's over,' he said. 'This is an artistic waste and economic waste.' In recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams's 'Antony and Cleopatra,' is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,' a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon's novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, 'La Sonnambula' and Kaija Saariaho's 'Innocence,' are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States. A majority of recent Met co-productions played elsewhere before arriving in New York. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager says he's fine with letting others go first. 'Much as when Verdi was writing his operas, they were usually, if not always, better the second or third time around,' Gelb said in a phone interview. He explained that unlike shows on Broadway, opera does not enjoy the benefit of previews: 'So very often, we don't see a work in its entirety until the final dress rehearsal, and at that point you can't make any changes other than minor technical ones.' 'Particularly in the case of new operas, even ones that we've commissioned ourselves,' Gelb added, 'I deliberately made arrangements with other companies so they might have the glory of the world premiere, but the Met has the benefit of what we learn from that premiere.' This strategy has allowed the Met to bring in more productions without bearing the full cost or risk alone. A co-production costs on average $2 million, or half of what it would take for the Met to stage a work on its own, Gelb said. (This figure does not include running costs or, in the case of a new opera, the additional expenses a commission entails.) But not every opera or every staging makes sense as a collaboration. Serge Dorny, general director of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, called co-productions increasingly essential for lesser-known works and for particularly complex stagings that would be logistically or economically difficult to schedule past their premiere runs. 'If a title is not a repertoire piece and, therefore, you know that the life within the house is going to be short or fragmented, a co-production is interesting,' Dorny said in a recent interview in Munich. Such was the case with one of the most acclaimed recent productions at his house: Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2023 staging of Prokofiev's 'War and Peace,' which was shared with the Liceu. More recently, the Barcelona company signed on to co-produce the Bayerische Staatsoper's new 'Ring' cycle, directed by Tobias Kratzer. Titles like these, Dorny said, make sense as co-productions, rather than the 'Bohèmes' and the 'Traviatas' that are an opera company's bread and butter. In 2023, the Bayerische Staatsoper debuted Claus Guth's production of Handel's 'Semele,' which will be seen at the Met in a future season. Dorny said that Gelb and his team were involved with 'Semele' from a very early stage and were able to raise questions about anything they felt might be challenging to reproduce on the Met's stage. 'My intuition is that it will work very well at the Met,' Guth said in a phone interview. 'Because I planned it in huge images, visually. It has aspects of a show that is already imagined for distance.' Another place where 'Semele' will travel is the Dutch National Opera. The Amsterdam company has co-produced or shared numerous productions with the Met in the past, including William Kentridge's 'Lulu,' McBurney's 'Die Zauberflöte' and Tcherniakov's 'Prince Igor.' Later this year, Tcherniakov will return to stage Tchaikovsky's rarely seen 'The Maid of Orleans,' which is destined for the Met in a future season. In a video interview, Sophie de Lint, the Dutch company's director, said co-productions were environmentally necessary, not merely financially expedient. 'We're doing a lot of webinars now to share knowledge,' she said in a phone interview, adding that she has a 'sustainability officer' who conducts a 'life-cycle analysis' for new stagings. The goal, she said, is to help determine how to share stagings efficiently, for example, by developing standardized support systems for the sets and modular solutions so that fewer of the moving parts required for a production 'have to be built every time or shipped every time.' Another important consideration, de Lint added, is that opera stages come in many sizes. 'It's a pity when we have to say, 'Sorry, but the project is too big and not compatible,'' she explained. Such was the assessment with Stefan Herheim's 2013 production of Richard Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg' at the summertime Salzburg Festival. Plans to bring it to the Met hit a snag when the original sets proved unusable, owing to differences in size between the two venues. 'Khovanshchina' was carefully planned for both houses. In Salzburg, the wide proscenium of the Grosses Festspielhaus — over 90 feet long — was narrowed using black side curtains. 'The whole evening was a revelation,' Gelb said of opening night. 'Before I left Salzburg, I met with Simon and told him I wanted to do it right away,' he said, adding that Esa-Pekka Salonen would conduct the Met performances, which are planned for the 2026-27 season. Gelb called the collaboration 'a good symbiotic relationship' with the potential to add to the Met's luster. 'Word of mouth and news reports and so forth that come out of Salzburg only whet the appetite of the American operatic public,' he said. 'It only stimulates excitement,' he added, 'if something is seen as a success abroad before it comes to New York.'
The Guardian
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: Khovanshchina; Carmen review – the parallels with modern Russia are unmissable
Dawn over the Moskva River. The bells of the Kremlin, deep and massive, toll. Red Square, deserted in the early morning, is pocked with the violence of a mob uprising the night before. Russia is in turmoil. So begins Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81), unfinished at his death from alcoholic delirium at the age of 42, and one of the unsolved riddles of the operatic repertoire. This grand, sprawling work opened the 2025 Salzburg Easter festival, well suited to this year's theme of 'wounds and wonders', in a compelling new production conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and performed by an international cast and musicians from Salonen's homeland, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. With sleuth-like determination over eight years and counting, he and a creative team led by the British fraternal partnership of director Simon McBurney and composer Gerard McBurney – fondly referred to in Salzburg as the McBrothers – presented a world-premiere staging of a new version of the opera. Originally intended for the Bolshoi theatre, Moscow in 2020, first Covid and then the invasion of Ukraine put paid to any such plan. Khovanshchina is steeped in the Russian psyche. Mussorgsky, grappling with his country's schismatic social and religious history, saw the past in the present. Using factual sources, he wrote his own idiosyncratic libretto, taking the so-called Khovansky Affair of the late 17th century as his starting point: Old Believers rise up against the westernising reforms of a regime that would lead to the rule of Peter the Great. The parallels with modern Russia are unmissable but not exact. This opera has no heroes. The sight, on the Salzburg stage, of a clean-shaven politician in grey suit, standing at a lectern in front of a replica of the Bolshoi curtain issuing diktats, needs no comment. The feudal lord Khovansky (Vitalij Kowaljow), facing death and festering in a self-indulgence of lust and drugs, has conspicuous oligarchic tendencies. Make your own connections. Every character is an embodiment of a ruthless faction seeking dominion, expressed through the raw melodies that are Mussorgsky's hallmarks, the drama always driven by the music, liturgical chant dipping in and out of folk song and sung-speech patterns. Epic and populous choruses (superbly sung by the Slovak Philharmonic Choir and others), also a key component of the composer's better-known masterpiece, Boris Godunov, hold up a mirror to the suffering of a nation. Against this historical tapestry, one fictional role offers a change of pace: that of Marfa, Old Believer and clairvoyant, Mother Russia figure, lover of seemingly every man on the stage, now violent, now devout. She is played with exceptional vocal and dramatic brilliance by the young mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina, born in Moscow, living in Switzerland, in what is surely a career-making performance. Resonant and strong at the top of her range, rich and potent in the contralto low notes, she is pivotal, offering humanity and empathy. At the moment of apocalypse, when the Old Believers determine on mass suicide, she raises her arms as a shower of earth falls on her, one of many moments of beauty in a production unafraid of harsh, modern realities. All the physical theatre strengths of Simon McBurney, best known for work with his company Complicité and a rare but probing visitor to opera (his stagings of Wozzeck for Aix-en-Provence and The Magic Flute for English National Opera, currently on at New York's Metropolitan Opera, have been triumphs), are brought into play, to bracing effect. In Rebecca Ringst's striking designs, which also use live video, the stage shifts from open space to steep rake to triangular compression, performers and chorus moving with fearless energy. In a large cast, Thomas Atkins, Ain Anger, Daniel Okulitch, Natalia Tanasii and Matthew White stood out. The reconstruction by Gerard McBurney, as fiercely imaginative as it is resolutely faithful – every note written, in some form or other, by Mussorgsky – uses material discovered in a Russian museum in the 1960s, woven convincingly together with the rest. The ending by Stravinsky (made, when he was in the midst of The Rite of Spring, at the request of the impresario Diaghilev) and the 1959 orchestration by Shostakovich for a film, the basis of most modern performances, are used here. McBurney's new musical bridge provides a missing link to the opera's skein of broken threads. A reflection of the importance of this staging of Khovanshchina was the presence in Salzburg of every opera intendant of note, among them those from Munich, Aix, the Royal Opera and the New York Met, where the production will travel, probably in 2030. By then its relevance may be even more acute. Bizet's Carmen, though minimally problematic in comparison, also exists in different versions. Damiano Michieletto's staging for the Royal Opera, revived by Dan Dooner, lacks focus and often looks chaotic, especially in crowd scenes. With Bizet's fertile score and the alluring 28-year-old Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina reprising her Carmen (apparently she will have sung it 100 times by the end of this season), there is much to enjoy. Despite an apology for illness, she still sang stunningly, even while lying on her back, and shimmied perfectly around her drooling menfolk. As Don José, the British tenor Freddie De Tommaso gradually relaxed to display his famed shining top notes and, as the role demands, an awkward, stiff pathos. This is not a vintage Carmen on stage, but the conducting of Mark Elder, pliant, springy and detailed, and the dazzling playing by the orchestra, reminded us anew of Bizet's short-lived but enduring genius. Star ratings (out of five)Khovanshchina ★★★★★ Carmen ★★★ Khovanshchina is at the Salzburg Easter festival, Austria, until 21 April Carmen is at the Royal Opera, London, until 3 July
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Unfinished Opera Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant
Instead of finishing his masterpiece 'Khovanshchina,' Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk. That's fiction: a scene from 'Moscow-Petushki,' a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of 'Khovanshchina' that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history. 'Yerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life — they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,' McBurney said in an interview. In real life, Mussorgsky 'embarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,' McBurney added. 'And he couldn't finish it.' McBurney has created a new, completed 'Khovanshchina,' and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a 'musical folk drama'), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film. McBurney called his contribution to the palimpsest of 'Khovanshchina' a bridge, built from melodic sketches, between Mussorgsky's music and the Stravinsky finale. Last year, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, performed a concert version of McBurney's completion. On Saturday, it will be staged in Salzburg, with the same conductor and orchestra, and directed by McBurney's brother, Simon. A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, it will travel to New York in the future. A recent rehearsal of 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg showed the work coming together with a striking, contemporary vision. The piece concerns political intrigue in 1682, but this performance features a blunt, vernacular new translation of the libretto; a staging of skin-crawling immediacy; and a fierce, unsentimental reading of the score. Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, this production embraces the work's unfinished state. McBurney's bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece. Hearing it, you can't forget how much is still missing from 'Khovanshchina.' 'We both agreed that it should be very simple, and instead of trying to create continuity between these bits and pieces, we should just accept that there isn't any,' Salonen said in an interview. 'These are fragments, and it just kind of is what it is.' McBurney has been fascinated with Mussorgsky since he was 14, when his father, the archaeologist Charles McBurney, traveled to Moscow and Leningrad to discuss his research findings with scholars. Charles mentioned to his K.G.B. minder that his son was fascinated by classical music; the minder gave him an enormous case of recordings from the state-owned label Melodiya to bring back to England. Those introduced Gerard to Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and 'Boris Godunov.' He soon became captivated by 'Khovanshchina' as well. 'I was always interested in its fragmentary and unfinished nature,' he said. In 1984, Gerard McBurney moved to Moscow, where he learned Russian and studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory. That experience has been invaluable for his work on 'Khovanshchina.' In addition to the musical reconstruction, McBurney has been making a contemporary English version of the libretto, with the translator Hannah Whitley, that preserves the original's vernacular. In one scene, the authoritarian Prince Ivan Khovansky tells the fanatical leader of the Old Believers, Dositheus, 'Together we will make Russia great again.' At another point, the title of the opera — often rendered as 'The Khovansky Affair' — is translated as something unprintable. Such choices capture the idiosyncratic style of the Russian libretto, which Mussorgsky developed, collagelike, from an obsessive study of the historical record and careful attention to the way people spoke on the street. 'He built himself an armature, and then he stuck these random bits on it,' McBurney said. 'And then, as the piece possessed him over the years, he started to weave in his own dreamlike riffs on the material.' Simon McBurney, the co-founder and artistic director of the theater company Complicité and an actor, is also interested in the work's contemporary resonances. His staging places it firmly within present-day authoritarianism. But, he said in an interview, the story of 'Khovanshchina' hardly needs updating. In the drama, there are no heroes, only ambivalent villains. Power asserts itself mercilessly, and the action is shot through with apocalyptic premonitions, which reminds him of our time. 'The young people I know sense the presence of the shadow, and therefore the impending catastrophe,' McBurney said. 'I'm not trying to bring it into the staging of the opera. It is there already.' Still, experience has taught him that relevance and realism are not the same thing. McBurney knows that the naturalistic acting style used in film can easily fall flat in opera, which has a slower pace in which the magic lies in a kind of zooming in on time. For 'Khovanshchina,' he worked with the singers to 'heighten' their acting, he said, making the movements onstage both slower and more intense. 'My job as a director is to get them — sometimes to teach them — how to hold the gesture in the body,' he said. 'Root it in the reality, but also find the dynamic form with the body which can work with the dynamic form of the music.' In Salonen's reading of that music, Mussorgsky's score is lean, metallic and very fast. Older recordings of 'Khovanshchina' tend to be sumptuous and Romantic, luxuriating in the composer's folk-inspired melodies. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra renders the same melodies as ephemeral as the bits of text from which Mussorgsky assembled his libretto. Mussorgsky's unusual spinning modulations convey the feeling of events spiraling out of control. 'I thought from the start that it shouldn't linger, because history is moving really fast at this point,' Salonen said. 'There are some moments of calm — little oasis moments — but it should never be static.' Still, the past has had a way of inserting itself into this production. The Russian mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina sings the part of Marfa, who is caught between love and the strict dogmas of the Old Believers. Some of Karyazina's ancestors on her father's side were members of that faith. They never talked about it, until her grandfather told her about her roots while they were listening to a scene from 'Khovanshchina' on the radio. A tragedy of Mussorgsky's drama is how political upheaval severs connections among people, their land and their history. 'People want to feel that they're not just a bit of fluff and when they die, there will be nothing left of them,' Gerard McBurney said. 'Somehow, if they could feel that their roots drew from the soil they loved when they were first growing up — that's a constant theme in the text of this opera. It's the longing for an impossible dream.'
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘So resonant': the 19th-century Russian opera being revived across Europe
A Russian political leader sings about war with Ukrainians and the need for a 'durable peace'. The fractured political elite argues over whether they should pursue closer ties with Europe or embrace Russian traditions. The plot of Modest Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina was written in the 1870s and is set in the 1680s. But, as the characters lament the fact that their homeland is mired in an endless cycle of violence and unhappiness, the dark and brooding work can feel alarmingly contemporary. That may explain why productions of the long and complicated opera, which covers a period of political unrest that few outside Russia are familiar with and which used to be performed rarely in the west, are now springing up across Europe. Last summer, a staging at the Staatsoper in Berlin opened with a scene set in the modern-day Kremlin, with the entire action recast as a contemporary political re-enactment for propaganda purposes. Another new production premiered in Geneva last month with plenty of modern overtones: the character of a 17th-century scribe was portrayed as a hacker, sitting in an office chair as long lines of Russian computer code appeared on giant screens behind him. Later, the same screens showed video footage of the main characters debating, as if on state television political talkshows. Next week, yet another production of Khovanshchina will premiere at the Salzburg Easter festival, staged by the British director Simon McBurney. He said his production would be 'very much about today' rather than a historical recreation, and described the opera as 'hauntingly beautiful, and sometimes terrifying', in a video interview in between rehearsals. Photographs from dress rehearsals in Salzburg showed characters in strikingly modern dress, and McBurney said one of the key influences on his thinking for how to conceptualise the opera was a policy speech Vladimir Putin gave at the Bolshoi theatre some years ago. In fact, McBurney's original plan had been to put it on at the Bolshoi in 2022, in what would have been one of the first times a foreign director had staged a Russian classic on the country's most hallowed stage. McBurney worked on plans for the staging over many years with his brother, Gerard, a composer who spent time in Russia and has re-orchestrated the finale of the opera, which exists in many different versions because Mussorgsky left it unfinished. But the full-scale invasion of Ukraine made that plan untenable. The Bolshoi has since been taken over by the Putin loyalist Valery Gergiev, and late last year revived a hyper-traditional production of Khovanshchina with a set design first used in 1952. McBurney took his ideas to Salzburg, in what is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera that will later be staged in New York. Rehearsal photos show a Putin-like suited politician giving a speech from a lectern featuring a modern Russian coat of arms, in front of a mock-up of the Bolshoi's distinctive stage curtain. 'I don't know how it might have gone down when I was going to do it in Moscow. I don't know what the consequence would have been for me. I'm very sad that we're not able to do it in the Bolshoi,' he said. Although productions of Khovanshchina inside Russia still tend to feature period sets and costumes, there is plenty in the opera that lends itself to a modern re-imagination. 'If you changed a few names in the libretto, it would describe current events. I can't think of any other opera where that would be the case,' said Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor of the Salzburg production. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion Calixto Bieito, the Spanish director behind the recent production in Geneva, said he wanted to leave some of the contemporary relevance to the imagination of viewers. 'Of course when you read the text you cannot avoid making connections with the present day, but those are connections for the audience to make, not for me,' he said in an interview before the premiere in Geneva. Still, the production was peppered with references to contemporary Russia. Not every opera house feels the time is right to stage Russian historical dramas. The Polish National Opera was due to stage Boris Godunov, another brooding meditation on power by Mussorgsky, in March 2022, but cancelled the run after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 'At times like these, opera is silent … Let our silence speak of our solidarity with the people of Ukraine,' Mariusz Treliński, the theatre's artistic director, said at the time. The opera was again scheduled for the 2024-25 season but conditional on the war in Ukraine ending; as that did not happen, it was again removed, and a spokesperson for the theatre said it was 'hard to say if or when' the production would run. But farther west in Europe, there have been fewer qualms about staging Russian works, further evidenced by news this week that Ralph Fiennes would direct Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Paris next year. In June, the exiled Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov will stage Boris Godunov in Amsterdam. According to the website of the Dutch National Opera, he will 'incorporate his own experiences in Russia in this highly topical production'. Serebrennikov led one of Moscow's most successful theatres and mounted several opera productions at the Bolshoi before he was arrested in 2017, and spent nearly two years under house arrest before being freed. When it comes to Khovanshchina, which ends with the mass suicide of a religious sect by self-immolation, despite the firm Russian context there was also something more universal about the work, said McBurney. People were currently experiencing a 'perception of history', he said, and there was a sense in the air that we were on the brink of major change, just as there was when Mussorgsky was writing in the late 19th century. 'We are aware of a wave, and we don't quite know what form it's going to take, whether it's going to be a sudden acceleration of ecological disaster, or whether it's going to take the form of human violence, we don't know. But we do feel the wave, and in some sense that is why [the opera] is so resonant. You can feel the impending disaster,' he said.
