On 24 May as part of the XXVII Music Festival Stars of the White Nights, the Mariinsky II will be hosting a premiere of Giacomo Puccini's opera La fanciulla del West, staged for the first time at the Mariinsky Theatre.
The Stage Director, as well as Production Designer, Lighting Designer and co-Costume Designer together with Marianna Stránská, will be Arnaud Bernard, who at the Mariinsky Theatre has previously staged a production of Giuseppe Verdi's opera I vespri siciliani. Musical Director and Conductor – Valery Gergiev. There will be subsequent premiere performances on 26 May (13.00 and 19.30) and 14 and 28 June.
The roles are being rehearsed by:
Minnie: Maria Bayankina, Anna Markarova, Amalia Gogeshvili, Viktoria Yastrebova, Irina Makarova, Yekaterina Solovyova and Yekaterina Shimanovich;
Dick Johnson: Akhmed Agadi, Denis Zakirov and Avgust Amonov;
Jack Rance: Roman Burdenko, Vadim Kravets, Vladimir Moroz and Kirill Zharovin;
Nick: Andrei Popov, Alexander Timchenko, Alexander Mikhailov and Yevgeny Akhmedov;
Ashby: Grigory Karasyov, Dmitry Grigoriev, Yuri Vlasov and Oleg Sychov;
Sonora: Edem Umerov, Vladislav Kupriyanov, Yefim Zavalny and Sergei Romanov;
Jake Wallace: Yevgeny Ulanov and Gleb Peryazev.
Arnaud Bernard says of the production that: "It is a very stylish opus, and the action works incredibly well in the sense in which it was intended – in the form of a Western. And so I won't transfer the action to a different time period. This opera is difficult to stage, but it is fantastic. There are seventeen characters in it, and not justsmall roles, but significant solo parts – it's a huge amount of work.Arguably, the Mariinsky Theatre is the only place in the world that has the capability of having several casts available for such a production at the same time. That's why Valery Gergiev and I chose this opera – it lets us demonstrate all the resources of the Mariinsky Opera.
On 10 December 1910 Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West received its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. The production, conducted by Arturo Toscanini and featuring such outstanding artists as Emmy Destin, Enrico Caruso and Pasquale Amato, was a tremendous success with the American public. As witnessed by chronicles, the composer was called to take a bow over thirty times, and the opera was performed eleven times that season. Half a year later, La fanciulla del West was being performed in Europe: there were premieres at Covent Garden, the Opera di Roma and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. In 1912 the opera was staged at La Scala, and subsequently at theatres in Paris, Berlin and Vienna.
In 1913 this work by Giacomo Puccini was performed in Russia for the first time under the tile The Daughter of the West. The production, with a Russian translation of the libretto, took place at a private theatre – the Moscow Opera of Sergei Zimin. Over the course of the season, The Daughter of the West was performed more than twenty times and was deeply loved by the public, which to a great degree could be explained by the "densely melodramatic plot and the realistic quality of the crowd scenes. In the Soviet era, La fanciulla del West was staged at Leningrad's Maly Opera (1941), as well as in Riga (The Girl from California) and Novosibirsk.
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