Evgeny Pisarev conquers the opera Olympus: the New Opera staged a drama about love and madness

It turned out to be a performance that everyone can go to – both adherents of traditions and fans of the modern approach to the classics.

This is not the first time I am convinced that a reviewer should watch a performance not at a press screening or even at the premiere, unless he is, of course, an advertiser and a secular chronicler. You need to watch the performance when it is firmly included in the repertoire, when artists and the orchestra go on stage and into the pit in working mode, when the hall is filled not with invited guests, but with spectators who spent money on tickets. Only then does an objective picture of success or failure emerge. The “Royal Bride” in the New Opera is an absolute success. Evgeny Pisarev, who is increasingly asserting himself as a director of not only dramatic but also musical theater, has the most important quality for staging musicals and especially operas: he loves and hears music. By the way, not every professional of opera director can boast of this - we will not point a finger, but there are such, alas.

Over the performance worked a strong staging group, part of which - long-time co-authors of Pisarev: scenographer Zinovy Margolin, costume designer Maria Danilova, choreographer Alberts, lighting artist Alexander Sivaev. Conductors Dmitry Liss and Fedor Beznosikov joined this team, choirmaster Yulia Senyukova.

The overture immediately involved the audience in the dynamic pulse of the “Tsarskaya”. In this score, Rimsky-Korsakov, the master of epic canvases, lyrical beauty and pantheistic musical paintings, appears in a completely different capacity. “The Royal Bride” is extremely dramatic, the events in it are sharp, sharp, cruel. Feelings are not tender lyrics, but passions, unrestrained and uncontrolled. The composer wrote it in 1899, a year before the onset of the twentieth century. It’s no surprise that musical expressionism is already emerging. Young maestro Beznosikov (for a conductor 33 years is very little) sets a fast pace and a powerful - today's - drive. Even the lyrical theme from the overture sounds unusually fast, and this is fully justified by the plan of the directors. At the last bars of the overture, the titles appear on the back – literally a couple of phrases dedicating the audience to the historical truth of the events described by playwright Mei and composer Rimsky-Korsakov.

Zinovy Margolin built a two-tiered structure - a bridge, a staircase, under the stairs - wooden benches, candlesticks with burning candles, in the background the Kremlin wall. All the scenery is rigid, there are no video projections. The round chandelier with candles is suspended on the right - its meaning will be deciphered in the finale, when under it, as under a halo, there will be a mad, dying Martha (Maria Buinosova, the owner of a bright, ringing soprano) - the only ray of light in the dark kingdom of Ivan the Terrible. Rishat Reshitov (Grigory Gryaznoy) creates an image of a charismatic villain, literally bewitched by a passionate love for Martha. Passion is owned by Lyubasha – Polina Panina. Pale, slim, with burning black eyes, she looks like the heroine of silent art deco cinema. The costumes of Maria Danilova are part of the most important stylistic decision of the performance: there is no reconstruction of historical clothes – this is the artist’s fantasy on the theme of the Russian Middle Ages. Fur hats boyars and gray flowing silk dress Lyubasha, leather coats of oprichniki and European hat Bomelia - all this somehow actually gives rise to associations with the frightening period of the reign of Ivan the Fourth. All the characters are obsessed with passions - Bomeliy in the wonderful performance of Dmitry Pianov, Ivan Lykov (the beautiful tenor Alexei Neklyudov) and even Malyuta Skuratov (Danil Knyazev), in love with Lyubash. And only Marfa’s father Vasily Sobakin, whose part was performed by Vladimir Kudashev, is a more typical character for Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas. But his peace of mind is destroyed when his daughter falls into madness before his eyes.

Evgeny Pisarev staged a performance in which the psychological motivation of each character is fully dictated by music. There are many nuances in the behavior of heroes. An example is the scene when Ivan Lykov in his aria tells the guests of Dirty about his impressions of staying in Europe. As he tells the story, the oprichniki get nervous – they clearly do not like the “liberal” order of Europeans. And at some point Lykov feels this and sharply offers a toast to the Emperor. At the same time, the director does not provoke the viewer to banter or even irony. He does not reduce the story to everyday realism. Nowhere is the high genre of opera shy. His “Royal Bride” is a real mystery in which the storm of human passions acquires a sacred meaning.