On 13 October at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre soloists of the Academy of Young Opera Singers will be presenting Vissarion Shebalin’s opera The Taming of the Shrew in concert, the first performance in the Mariinsky Theatre’s new vocal series Not Love Alone.
Soviet classics will find a new lease of life thanks to Larisa Gergieva’s new subscription Not Love Alone. Soloists of the Academy of Young Singers will be performing rarely staged and even forgotten scores, such as Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon, Molchanov’s The Dawns Here Are Quiet, Dzerzhinsky’s And Quiet Flows the Don, Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cheryomushki and Shchedrin’s Not Love Alone. The revival of these works is not just nostalgia for the Soviet past but for the character of the music – youthfully ebullient, sincere, at times naïve and, undoubtedly, worthy of being performed on the stage and capable of finding a response from even the most diverse audiences.
Shebalin wrote the operetta The Taming of the Shrew for the Sverdlovsk Musical Comedy Theatre, as the composer had been evacuated there during the war. Shakespeare’s play had been transformed into a libretto by the theatre and literature historian and translator Abram Gozenpud, who specialised in the British playwright’s works. Despite his fine knowledge of the source material, Gozenpud departed from the original in many scenes. Shebalin was satisfied – after the premiere he responded to any compliments by saying “there’s a good libretto there.”
Several years later the composer reworked the operetta into a four-act comic opera which was first performed for the public in 1955 – sixty years ago.
The Taming of the Shrew was the only opera composed by Vissarion Shebalin (1902–1963).
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