Dead Souls returns to Moscow

The Mariinsky Theatre Premieres in Moscow project has been held as part of the Golden Mask festival since 2006, giving audiences in the capital city the opportunity to see what is new in the famous company’s opera and ballet repertoires. This year the project opens with Rodion Shchedrin’s opera Dead Souls which will be conducted by Valery Gergiev. The Moscow premiere of the production will mark eighty years since Rodion Shchedrin’s birth. This will be the Mariinsky Theatre’s first tour to the historic Bolshoi Theatre since it opened after reconstruction.

Thirty-five years have passed since the world premiere of the opera Dead Souls, which was commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre. The stage director of the 1977 production was the great master of Russian opera drama Boris Pokrovsky while the conductor was Yuri Temirkanov. The next year the opera was staged by the Mariinsky Theatre (then known as the Kirov), and ever since the work’s onstage destiny has known mixed fortunes: in Russia the opera was not staged for thirty years, while abroad it was performed only in Brno and Boston. The revival of one of Rodion Shchedrin’s most complex works in Russia began with a concert performance at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre in 2010, while in spring 2011 stage director Vasily Barkhatov and designer Zinovy Margolin produced a stage version which proved one of the musical highlights of the season. This production offers a new view of these “opera scenes after the poem by Nikolai Gogol” as Shchedrin himself defined the genre of his work. Critics acclaimed the production as worthy “of the title of the most important opera project of the first decade of the new century.”

The production has been nominated for a Golden Mask award in the category “Best Opera Production.” Also nominated are Vasily Barkhatov as “Best Stage Director,” Svetlana Volkova and Larisa Diadkova for “Best Female Role,” Sergei Aleksashkin and Sergei Semishkur for “Best Male Role,” Zinovy Margolin for “Best Work by a Designer,” Maria Danilova for “Best Work by a Costume Designer” and Damir Ismagilov for “Best Work by a Lighting Designer.” For details please go to the Golden Mask website.

The XVIII Golden Mask festival will run in Moscow from 27 March to 15 April 2012, with the prize-giving ceremony of Russia’s top theatre award taking place on 16 April at the Bolshoi Theatre.