… It was a performance about Russia and her vast lands and history.
An opera about both Tolstoy and Prokofiev that has a contemporary Weltanschauung.
Irena Leina. Kultura
Konchalovsky's solution is brilliant: the action takes place on a
convex dome like the curved surface of the Earth. This nicely reflects
the circularity of the waltz music in the “peace” themes, while its
ceaselessly changing landscape gives the “war” theme a dizzy, global
feel. All this is splendidly cinematic: under swirling Turner skies ,
the battling armies and oppressed multitudes shunt endlessly to and fro
while acts of casual brutality and hopeless heroism suggest war's pity,
terror and confusion. Prokofiev's atmospheric music emerges in all its
glory thanks to Gergiev's magic in the pit.
Michael Church. The Independent
This is a serious effort, influenced no doubt by the perceived
tastes on the international audience that awaits it. And Konchalovsky
has shunned any imposed outside “interpretation”. George Tsypin's sets
emphasize the opera's cosmic nature by placing the action on a convex
surface, apparently the top of a huge, mostly unseen globe. Tatyana
Noginova's period costumes – especially the soldier's uniforms – are
spectacular in their detail. The singing was splendid by any standard
and little short of astonishing when one bears in mind that all
57 roles (after the cuts) are cast solely from the company.
George Loomis. Musical America | | | Konchalovsky has brilliantly met the fundamental task: to stage a
vivid, dynamic, visually intense production, to embody the heroic and
patriotic idea of the opera without any false pathos. An entire gallery
of Russian characters, living, unpretentious, natural and life-like,
comes to life, contemplates, suffers and acts within the space of the
opera. On the huge stage of the Mariinsky Theatre, rigged out with the
new imported rotating circle, the stage director stealthily, like an
army commander, has mixed up Russian and French regiments, a partisan
division and the peasant militia, one after another recreating the
Battle of Borodino, the Shevardino Redoubt, Moscow streets aflame and
the shooting of French “arsonists”. The auditorium burst into applause
when the pure starry sky was reproduced on the white synthetic back
curtain of the stage, the Universe with its myriad stars, the
impetuously rushing clouds of smoke, the white stone walls and golden
cupolas of Moscow illumined by the flame. Also effective was the
rousing “red cockerel” of the fire with its spreading wings.
Larisa Kazanskaya. Russian Music Gazette
Your heart thumps when you hear the delicate, inexpressibly tender
melody of the waltz and suddenly the stage rumbles and flies upwards
under the feet of the dancing Natasha and Andrei, carrying off strange
faces, figures frozen still, Sonya, Pierre, Akhrosimova, the entire
disordered world in all its varied colours… And the director’s
discovery so stuns us with its unexpected subtlety and the
psychological truth comprising the very essence of Tolstoy’s deep
words.
Olga Gladkova. Smena |
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