<Translated automatically, it will be edited later>
The premiere of Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina will take place at the Bolshoi Theatre on June 7. The play is created in the editorial office of N.Rimsky-Korsakov ("Khovanshchina" is more often staged in the editorial office of Shostakovich). According to Alexander Vedernikov, the conductor of the opera, the chief conductor and musical director of the Bolshoi, when choosing the editorial board of Khovanshchina, it is necessary to start from the fact that there is no author's score: "One cannot say, as in the case of Boris Godunov, that the author's version is preferred... in the absence of an author's text, any decision is a compromise". Choosing between the existing versions, the creators of the production solve a multivariate task — the options differ not only textually, orchestrally, but also ideologically, since the authors of the versions lived at different times and placed accents according to how they saw it.
Mussorgsky himself had two versions of the text of Khovanshchina — an expanded one, on which Lamm's clavier was based, which means Shostakovich's orchestration, and a later, more concise one, which is textually close to Rimsky-Korsakov's edition. "We proceeded from the fact," Vedernikov told a press conference, "that Rimsky-Korsakov's editorial office is close in scale to the perception of the modern public." It fits easily in one evening. There is an optimal number of storylines in it that allow you to complete the development of the action in one evening. Being somewhat more removed from the author's text, compared with Shostakovich's edition, Rimsky-Korsakov's version, from the point of view of orchestral color, is closer to Mussorgsky's composition. According to Vedernikov, Rimsky-Korsakov's edition lacks "certain expressionistic layers" peculiar to the 20th century, which are clearly read in Shostakovich's orchestration. All this determined the choice of the creators of the play in favor of Rimsky-Korsakov's editorial office.
Speaking about the concept of the production of Khovanshchina, director Yuri Alexandrov said at a press conference that the creators of the play set themselves the task of trying to unite three centuries of Russian history and draw a connecting line between the illusory, pictorial beginning of the XIX century and the machinery, the rigid approach of the XXI century. This also determined the style of the set design: documentary, severity, restraint, rigor. The directors practically abandoned color as a pictorial principle. The principle of "Paint yourself" works. "Little red Streltsy, little blue Petrovtsy, spotted women — we refused this," says Alexandrov. "We clothed the action in the color of an engraving, a black-and-white film and built a performance ... according to the cinema principle." Many scenes are divided into a large number of episodes, and there is a purely "cinematic" montage of scenes in which the main theme is a person, a character in development.
According to the production designer Vyacheslav Okunev, there is no scenographic extremism in the play. The genre of grand style is disappearing, and despite the fact that the main thing is people and the close-up of the characters is very important, I wanted the monumentality of individual scenes to be preserved. The main driving associations were cinematographic - films by Eisenstein and Tarkovsky. "I wanted to remove the painted, splint shade that we are used to in opera, and focus on the face. If everything is black and white, restrained, then the faces remain alive," says Okunev. Alexandrov called the main idea of the production the concentration not on the split between different groups of people, but on the split in the heart of each person.
The main parts are rehearsed by: Ivan Khovansky — Alexander Naumenko, Vladimir Matorin, Valery Gilmanov; Dosifey — Vyacheslav Pochapsky, Vladimir Matorin, Leonid Zimnenko, Taras Shtonda; Marfa — Tatyana Erastova, Nina Terentyeva, Svetlana Shilova; Golitsyn — Lev Kuznetsov, Zurab Sotkilava, Mikhail Gubsky, Roman Muravitsky; Andrey Khovansky — Mikhail Urusov, Pavel Kudryavchenko; Shaklovity — Yuri Nechaev, Vladimir Redkin, Vladimir Bukin.
Source.
The premiere of Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina will take place at the Bolshoi Theatre on June 7. The play is created in the editorial office of N.Rimsky-Korsakov ("Khovanshchina" is more often staged in the editorial office of Shostakovich). According to Alexander Vedernikov, the conductor of the opera, the chief conductor and musical director of the Bolshoi, when choosing the editorial board of Khovanshchina, it is necessary to start from the fact that there is no author's score: "One cannot say, as in the case of Boris Godunov, that the author's version is preferred... in the absence of an author's text, any decision is a compromise". Choosing between the existing versions, the creators of the production solve a multivariate task — the options differ not only textually, orchestrally, but also ideologically, since the authors of the versions lived at different times and placed accents according to how they saw it.
Mussorgsky himself had two versions of the text of Khovanshchina — an expanded one, on which Lamm's clavier was based, which means Shostakovich's orchestration, and a later, more concise one, which is textually close to Rimsky-Korsakov's edition. "We proceeded from the fact," Vedernikov told a press conference, "that Rimsky-Korsakov's editorial office is close in scale to the perception of the modern public." It fits easily in one evening. There is an optimal number of storylines in it that allow you to complete the development of the action in one evening. Being somewhat more removed from the author's text, compared with Shostakovich's edition, Rimsky-Korsakov's version, from the point of view of orchestral color, is closer to Mussorgsky's composition. According to Vedernikov, Rimsky-Korsakov's edition lacks "certain expressionistic layers" peculiar to the 20th century, which are clearly read in Shostakovich's orchestration. All this determined the choice of the creators of the play in favor of Rimsky-Korsakov's editorial office.
Speaking about the concept of the production of Khovanshchina, director Yuri Alexandrov said at a press conference that the creators of the play set themselves the task of trying to unite three centuries of Russian history and draw a connecting line between the illusory, pictorial beginning of the XIX century and the machinery, the rigid approach of the XXI century. This also determined the style of the set design: documentary, severity, restraint, rigor. The directors practically abandoned color as a pictorial principle. The principle of "Paint yourself" works. "Little red Streltsy, little blue Petrovtsy, spotted women — we refused this," says Alexandrov. "We clothed the action in the color of an engraving, a black-and-white film and built a performance ... according to the cinema principle." Many scenes are divided into a large number of episodes, and there is a purely "cinematic" montage of scenes in which the main theme is a person, a character in development.
According to the production designer Vyacheslav Okunev, there is no scenographic extremism in the play. The genre of grand style is disappearing, and despite the fact that the main thing is people and the close-up of the characters is very important, I wanted the monumentality of individual scenes to be preserved. The main driving associations were cinematographic - films by Eisenstein and Tarkovsky. "I wanted to remove the painted, splint shade that we are used to in opera, and focus on the face. If everything is black and white, restrained, then the faces remain alive," says Okunev. Alexandrov called the main idea of the production the concentration not on the split between different groups of people, but on the split in the heart of each person.
The main parts are rehearsed by: Ivan Khovansky — Alexander Naumenko, Vladimir Matorin, Valery Gilmanov; Dosifey — Vyacheslav Pochapsky, Vladimir Matorin, Leonid Zimnenko, Taras Shtonda; Marfa — Tatyana Erastova, Nina Terentyeva, Svetlana Shilova; Golitsyn — Lev Kuznetsov, Zurab Sotkilava, Mikhail Gubsky, Roman Muravitsky; Andrey Khovansky — Mikhail Urusov, Pavel Kudryavchenko; Shaklovity — Yuri Nechaev, Vladimir Redkin, Vladimir Bukin.
Source.
Bolshoi Theatre: "Khovanshchina" in the style of engraving
RBC, June 3, 2002
