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 The consciously Wagnerian vision of "Troika", a first ever
staging of the late-Romantic Russian symphonist's only three
operatic works as a single evening's performance, has stretched
creativity, in design as well as musically, in the restrictive
modern confines of the Belgian capital's Theatre National.
And audiences responded with delight to young St. Petersburg
conductor Mikhail Tatarnikov and a cast of mainly Russian
soloists, including veteran baritone Sergei Leiferkus as the "Skupoi
Rytsar", the Covetous Knight, in the pivotal piece.
Tatarnikov, who compared it to mounting a longer Wagner work in
a difficult space, teases out echoes among the three very
different short operas, with the early work "Aleko" opening and
"Francesca da Rimini" the third. For want of a pit, Danish
designer Kirsten Dehlholm threads visual pattern and contrast
through the three while weaving the orchestra into the sets.
"To be honest, all they have in common is the composer," said
Tatarnikov. "That's in fact where the interest and the challenge
of the production lies -- to stage three different stories while
still creating an arc of tension among them."
For "Aleko", a murderous love triangle Rachmaninov wrote for his
1893 graduation, Dehlholm has the cast move in psychedelic
costume arranged across a terrace; "Francesca", relating Dante's
murdered and damned lovers, has the same terrace but costumes in
abstract black and white. Both, she calls, a "visual score".
COVERED MARKET
In both, too, Tatarnikov must work the sound of his singers and
chorus over the on-stage orchestra. No easy task. And in "Rytsar",
a Pushkin tale of familial greed, Dehlholm brings the soloists
front of stage, working over video shot in a nearby derelict
cinema where she first hoped to stage the entire work.
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Instead, audience immersion is achieved by the chorus, in full
costume, circulating trance-like through the foyer at the interval
in the Theatre National. There, disoriented La Monnaie regulars are
also directed around the unfamiliar surroundings by ushers in
T-shirts bearing slogans such as "Get Lost".
A sense of adventure and discovery, which will take the company
through half a dozen other venues including the circus and an old
covered market over the coming season, is evident in "Troika". It
takes the audience on a journey from the student Rachmaninov to the
symphonic maestro contemplating a first love for opera that was
thwarted by a lukewarm response to "Aleko".
For Tatarnikov, that early work, with bass-baritone Kostas
Smoriginas as the gypsy Aleko and the Bolshoi's young soprano Anna
Nechaeva as his lover, is a traditional, Italian-style opera; for
designer Dehlholm, it is "opera as theater".
Her rich, video-backed "Rytsar", with baritone Ilya Silchukov
memorable as The Duke opposite Leiferkus's Knight, is, she says,
"opera as architecture", while Tatarnikov calls its complex,
wordiness "the most Wagnerian" of the three.
"Francesca", with Nechaeva, Dimitris Tiliakos as her husband and
Sergey Semishkur as his brother her lover, is "opera as visual art"
to Dehlholm. For Tatarnikov it is "symphonic opera".
Throughout the evening, the playing, the design, the raw and
unlovely human emotions of the simple plots - as well as the
lowering background presence in all three pieces of bass-baritone
Alexander Vassiliev - bring the works together as one.
(Editing by Michael Roddy and Ralph Boulton)
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