On 24 August at the BBC Proms, soloists of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Opera Singers and the London Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen will present the British premiere of a concert version of Dmitry Shostakovich’s uncompleted opera Orango.
The BBC Proms festival of promenade-concerts is one of the most significant cultural events run by the BBC, drawing performers from throughout the world. Its aim is to introduce wider audiences to the world of classical music. The concerts take place each year between July and September at various venues and parks in London. This year’s festival marks an anniversary year as it has been running for one hundred and twenty years.
Under the baton of Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky Chorus, Orchestra and opera soloists have appeared at the Proms on numerous occasions, though this year marks the debuts of singers from the Academy. At the Royal Albert Hall soloists Natalia Pavlova, Natalia Yakimova, Alexander Shagun, Alexander Trofimov, Vladimir Babokin, Oleg Losev, Dmitry Koleushko, Ivan Novoselov, Yuri Yevchuk and Denis Begansky will be appearing in Shostakovich’s surrealist opera Orango. The work will be performed in an orchestral version by British composer Gerard McBurney.
The libretto by Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Starchakov is based on the story of the human ape Orango who has been created by science, like Bulgakov’s Sharikov. Orango, a mercenary careerist and enemy of communism, is a caricature of the decadent West who openly criticises the Soviet Union.
The opera was commissioned from the twenty-six-year-old composer by the Bolshoi Theatre in 1932 to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution, but it was never completed.
The manuscript (roughly forty minutes of music for piano, chorus and eleven solo singers) was discovered in 2004 by Olga Digonskaya, a researcher of the Glinka Archive and Moscow Museum, in the Shostakovich Archive. The man behind the world premiere was the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2011 in Los Angeles. In 2014 together with the London Philharmonia Orchestra he presented Orango at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire as part of the Mstislav Rostropovich Festival. That same year, with the Finnish Radio Orchestra and the Gustaf Sjökvist and Mikaeli Chamber Choruses, Salonen took the opera to the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm, the lead roles being performed by soloists of the Mariinsky Academy. Last May a stage version of Orango produced by the Perm Opera House under the baton of Teodor Currentzis proved a sensation at the Diaghilev Festival.
The “resurrection” of the opera may well prove another sensational event for London audiences, as the young Shostakovich’s opus touches on still-current matters of scientific progress, cultural differences and the public mind-set.
Official website of the BBC Proms: www.bbc.co.uk/events
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