The Mariinsky Theater's 224th season started with a new production of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera "Mazeppa." This staging was created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where it premiered in March this year.
The plot of "Mazeppa" is based on Alexander Pushkin's poem "Poltava." The hero, Mazeppa, a Ukrainian hitman, asks his friend Kochubey for the hand of his daughter, Maria. Receiving a refusal, he abducts the girl, and Kochubey in turn denounces Mazeppa's separatist plans to Peter the Great. The tsar fails to appreciate this treachery and hands Kochubey over to Mazeppa, who has his friend executed. Maria goes mad with grief and guilt.
Clearly this is not just historical but also intense psychological drama -- Tchaikovsky's specialty -- but this overcrowded production by Yury Alexandrov almost obliterates the opera's poignancy.
In the already busy second scene, for example, the set designer Georgy Tsypin furnished the stage with, among other things, 22 white statues, two white bulls and a large quantity of oversized white fruit. This scene also brought in the entire cast, mostly bedecked in gold. How was the audience supposed to synthesize such a pluralistic image? The bulls clearly symbolized the warring Mazeppa and Kochubey, and admittedly the performers had to be there, but beyond that I was lost.
The first curtain drop followed this scene, and was met with bewildered, somewhat relieved applause. The following scene was relatively less crowded but, alas, the statues remained, as though defying the audience to make sense of them -- their purpose only became clear in the second act. More wonders of stage-cluttering ensued in later scenes.
An exaggerated sense of distance between the audience and the singers, who were constantly elevated or obscured, was another counterintuitive and distracting feature of the production.
Nevertheless, the performances were excellent, especially in the second act, when the stage emptied a little, allowing the singers to move around freely. Baritone Nikolai Putilin reprised his Mazeppa, which was well received in New York, with assurance and pleasingly clear diction. He also took the prize -- strongly contested -- for singing convincingly in a ridiculous pose.
Soprano Tatiana Pavlovskaya was a powerful, if somewhat stiff, Maria. The role of Kochubey was sung by Mariinsky mainstay Mikhail Kit, who, while failing to match Mazeppa's anger early in the performance, compensated by consummately playing the victim.
Oleg Balashov was appropriately earnest as Maria's other admirer, Andrei -- a character who is not found in Pushkin's poem but was added by Tchaikovsky in order to bring in one of his favorite themes, unrequited love, before killing him off. Fyodor Kuznetsov reveled in the role of Mazeppa's nasty henchman, Orlik, and the role of Maria's mother was sung with fire and efficiency by renowned mezzo Larisa Dyadkova.
The orchestra, led by Mariinsky artistic director Valery Gergiev, was, like the singers, best in the lyrical heart of the opera. The chorus struggled to find space on the stage, but nonetheless was uniformly strong.
This is an entertaining, if often confusing, production. Audience members should not forget to take their sense of humor -- and perhaps some aspirin.
Cosmos
President
