Premiere of The Enchanted Wanderer in Kazan

At the Tatar State Academic Musa Jalil Opera and Ballet Theatre the Mariinsky Opera Company, Chorus and Orchestra will be presenting the Kazan premiere of Alexei Stepanyuk’s production of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera The Enchanted Wanderer. The lead roles will be performed by Kristina Kapustinskaya, Sergei Aleksashkin and Andrei Popov. The performance will be conducted by maestro Gergiev.

The opera is being performed as part of the XXX International Fyodor Chaliapin Opera Festival, which this year runs from 1 to 17 February in the capital of Tatarstan. The playbill for the anniversary festival includes twelve operas and two gala concerts. As well as appearing in the premiere, Mariinsky Theatre performers will also be singing in other operas at Kazan’s most important theatre – on 7 February Olga Pudova performed the role of Lucia di Lammermoor in the eponymous opera by Gaetano Donizetti, while Ekaterina Semenchuk will be appearing as Amneris in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida. Other festival guests include the renowned German bass René Pape, who will be performing the title role in Modest Musorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov on 13 February, the date of Chaliapin’s birth. Valery Gergiev’s arrival will prove one of the festival’s highlights as this year marks his first performance there.

The annual Chaliapin Festival was founded in 1982 as a local republican music forum, while from 1985 it became an all-Russian event and in 1991 it became an international one. Over the years it has seen performances by outstanding soloists from the Bolshoi Theatre such as Irina Arkhipova, Tatiana Yerastova, Tamara Sinyavskaya, Artur Eizen, Alexander Vedernikov, Alexei Maslennikov and Vladislav Piavko as well as Mariinsky Theatre soloists including Olga Kondina, Irina Bogacheva, Gennady Bezzubenkov, Viktor Chernomortsev and Yuri Marusin among other famed singers.

Shchedrin’s opera The Enchanted Wanderer was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Lorin Maazel, the world premiere taking place in 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall and causing a veritable media furore. The opera was first performed in Russia in concert in 2007 at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre, a stage version of the work being premiered one year later during the Stars of the White Nights festival.