On 24 October at 19.30 at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre there will be a premiere of a new production of Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. The Stage Director and Costume Designer as well as co-Production Designer in collaboration with Marsel Kalmagambetov will be Anna Matison. The lead roles are to be performed by Gamid Abdulov (Pelléas), Aigul Khismatullina (Mélisande), Oleg Sychov (Arkel), Elena Sommer (Geneviève), Andrey Serov (Golaud) and Alexander Palekhov (Yniold). Valery Gergiev will be conducting.
The world premiere of the opera Pelléas et Mélisande based on the eponymous play by Maurice Maeterlinck took place in Paris at the Opéra Comique on 30 April 1902. It was far from everyone in the audience who was able to see and understand the composer’s idea straight away, though with the passing of time praise of the work was only to grow. For the French, this opera by Claude Debussy became an object of national pride and an historic event that heralded the dawn of the 20th century in music. Nevertheless, despite the beauty of the orchestration and the vocal roles, as well as the polysemy of the symbolism that was a gift for stage directors, the opera is but rarely staged. In Russia, Pelléas et Mélisande was first performed in 1915 at the Petrograd Musical Drama Theatre. In 2007 it was staged by the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Musical Theatre, followed by the Mariinsky Theatre in 2012 (Stage Director – Daniel Kramer).
The new production at the Mariinsky Theatre is being directed by Anna Matison, known to St Petersburg audiences for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel – which marked her directing debut – and for designing the ballets Bambi, In the Jungle and Symphony in Three Movements.
“My aim,” she reveals during her interview, “is for us to empathise with each of the characters in Act IV. Golaud loves and suffers because he has an infinite appreciation for this reward from destiny – for himself to be able to love, because it had seemed to him that he was no longer capable of feeling. We should also feel pity for the reckless Pelléas, who is driven to abandon this sordid place as his youth demands freedom, yet there is nothing that can help him in this, he is doomed, just as are all the others.”
The next performances of the new production are to take place at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre on 28 October, 5 November and 13 December.
| user_name | | Exit |
