On 21 May at 19.00 mariinsky.tv will be staging an online broadcast of Rodion Shchedrin's opera Dead Souls. The broadcast commemorates the date of the publication of the first issue of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol's great poem – it was on this day in 1842 that the publishing house produced the first copies.
It was starting with the opera Dead Souls in 1978 that the history of productions of works by Shchedrin at the Kirov (Mariinsky) Theatre began, one that happily continues to this day. The acclaimed production by Boris Pokrovsky and Valery Levental was brought from the Bolshoi Theatre to Leningrad by Yuri Temirkanov, who had been entrusted with the Moscow premiere one year earlier. In 2011 stage director Vasily Barkhatov created his own version of Dead Souls for the Mariinsky Theatre together with his regular collaborator the designer Zinovy Margolin. Having made Chichikov's britzka the central element of the stage design in Cyclopic proportions, the production team underlined the image of the endless and dreary Russian road that is key for Gogol and Shchedrin. The from the windows of the britzka are scenes of Russian landscapes contemporary to the production: the video designers specially repeated Chichikov's route from Moscow to Kherson.
The finest singers of the Mariinsky Theatre dazzled in the opera, constructed along the lines of some grand portrait gallery. Critics were pleased to note the work of Larisa Diadkova as Korobochka, the querulous owner of the sewing factory, and of Sergei Semishkur as Nozdryov, a fresh admirer; they were stunned by the metamorphosis of Svetlana Volkova, who transformed herself into the sexless being of Plyushkin who crawls out from behind the skirting boards in a communal apartment in Leningrad; they were enchanted, too, at the vocal boldness and luscious acting humour of Sergei Aleksashkin as the heavy-browed Sobakevich. In this recording from 2011, one may hear all of them accompanied by Alexander Timchenko (Manilov), Karina Chepurnova (Lizanka Manilova) and Andrei Popov (Selifan). Here the role of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov is performed by Sergei Romanov. Valery Gergiev was the conductor.
Moreover, on 20 May at 19.00 on mariinsky.tv there will be a broadcast of yet another opera based on an example of classical literature – Giuseppe Verdi's legendary La traviata staged by Claudia Solti and designed by Isabella Bywater. The role of Violetta Valéry in this performance, recorded in 2016, was performed by Olga Peretyatko, one of the most sought-after sopranos of the present day. She was partnered on the stage by Yevgeny Akhmedov (Alfredo Germont) and Roman Burdenko (Giorgio Germont), while the Mariinsky Orchestra was conducted by Valery Gergiev.
The broadcasts will be available via the platform mariinsky.tv and via the social networking sites VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. Following the end of the online broadcasts, the videos will remain online for 24 hours.
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