On 23 November at the Concert Hall soloists of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Opera Singers will present Eduard Nápravník’s opera Dubrovsky (concert performance), marking one century since the death of the outstanding conductor and composer. Conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra will be Vladislav Karklin.
Eduard Nápravník, who was Principal Conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre for almost half a century (from 1869 to 1916) staged not only world premieres of works by other composers there but his own as well. He composed over two hundred works in major and small forms including four operas, the most successful of which was the opera Dubrovsky. The premiere took place at the Mariinsky Theatre on 3 January 1895 and featured the company’s leading soloists Nikolai and Medea Figner and Fyodor Stravinsky. The libretto after the eponymous tale by Alexander Pushkin, which differs from the literary source significantly only in the finale, was written by Modest Tchaikovsky. The opera, immensely popular with the public, entered the repertoires of many Russian theatres in addition to being staged in Bohemia and Germany. With time, however, Eduard Nápravník’s works – performed frequently during the composer’s lifetime – all but vanished from the stage.
For several seasons now the Mariinsky Academy of Young Opera Singers directed by Larisa Gergieva has been working on restoring rarely performed and even forgotten scores to the repertoire. Dubrovsky opens the vocal series School Classics, as part of which there will be performances of the operas The Stone Guest by Alexander Dargomyzhsky (19 December) and The Captain’s Daughter by Mikhail Kollontai (22 January), as well as the world premiere of Boris Grabovsky’s work Woe from Wit (21 March).
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