Mavra

Mavra is an opera based on Pushkin’s the Little House in Kolomna, a bridge between Russia and Europe: the score is indeed dedicated to the memory of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Glinka and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the three leading pro-western men in 19^th century Russian art. Voices from a past that is beautiful – with urban romances, gypsy songs and Italian opera in a Russian format – sound like listening to an old record. (Stravinsky had actually found the sliding musical intonations so typical of Mavra in gramophone recordings, still very imperfect in the 1920s.) One hears voices of St Petersburg’s Kolomna district where Stravinsky grew up: the church bells of the St Nicholas Naval Cathedral and the marches of the army brass bands that were based in New Holland. Bogdan Korolyok