A talk with Yannis Kokkos, Stage Director of Don Quichotte

Rehearsals for a production of Jules Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte have begun with a meeting of Stage Director and Production Designer Yannis Kokkos and soloists of the Mariinsky Opera and the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers. Valery Gergiev, Musical Director of the production, spoke first at the meeting. The maestro gave a warm welcome to the director and all involved in the production, expressing his confidence in the success of the collaboration. Yannis Kokkos introduced his production team colleagues and gave a detailed description of his vision and understanding of Massenet’s opera; it is an incredibly subtle work, with beautiful music and deep meaning, one of the French composer’s finest works for musical theatre. The director spoke of how carefully he had approached Don Quichotte, studying not only Cervantes’ original novel but also the travels undertaken by this renowned Spanish hidalgo through various ages and cultures. One way or another, all of this has influenced his production concept and may be latently observed in it; Yannis Kokkos particularly highlighted the fact that he sees “Don Quichotte as the embodiment of absolute kindness, akin to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin.” In line with the stage director’s idea, one of the main accents of the production lies in the carnival element, numerous dances and the abundance of large crowd scenes.