The Nose: Avgust Amonov
Platon Kuzmich Kovalev: Vladimir Moroz
Ivan Yakovlevich: Edem Umerov
Praskovia Osipovna: Tatiana Kravtsova
A District Constable: Boris Stepanov
A Doctor: Gennady Bezzubenkov
A Newspaper Clerk: Vadim Kravets
Ivan: Stanislav Leontiev
Yaryzhkin: Mikhail Makarov
Pelageya Grigorievna Podtochina: Marina Mareskina
Her Daughter: Tatiana Pavlovskaya
World premiere: 18 January 1930, State Academic Maly Opera Theatre, Leningrad
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre and premiere of this production: 10 April 2004
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes
The performance has one interval
Shostakovich's phantasmagorical opera has only been staged in Russia at Leningrad's Maly Opera Theatre in 1930 (the world premiere) and at the Boris Pokrovsky Chamber Music Theatre in Moscow in 1974. Unlike his predecessors, Yuri Alexandrov did not regard The Nose as a satire of the tsarist regime or the bourgeoisie – his production at the Mariinsky Theatre had the secondary title of Passions for Kovalev. Apropos, the true hero of the production was not Kovalev, but the Nose itself, which appeared before the audience in many guises all at once: a prop nose of real-life proportions, a rubber canvas in the form of a nose, a dancer sewn into an elastic white bag and, finally, the Tenor-Nose that arises from the grave in the form of Napoleon.
Alexandrov admitted that "This piece by Gogol, the great mystifier and at the same time a great Russian sufferer, is seriously complex. I have made it even more complex." Here we have a circus, ROSTA posters, a chief of police dressed in Gogol's overcoat the size of a three-storey building and Sirin and Alkonost, soaring over a biblical-like crowd in Kazan Cathedral. The director used the same method employed at the Mariinsky Theatre five years earlier with Semyon Kotko: witty grotesque and the creation of a hypertrophied and at times riotous libretto of the on-stage plot. Combined with the staccato-arrangement of Shostakovich's constantly twisting and sparkling score, the result is rather extravagant. The "pivot" of this colourful and kaleidoscopic spectacle came with Zinovy Margolin's sets – an upside-down St Petersburg courtyard. At key moments in the opera a video backdrop is revealed and the plot unfolds in a stunning metallic tunnel – "a combination of Tatlin's Tower pushed on its side with urban catacombs inhabited by American thrillers." Bogdan Korolyok
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This highlighting is being used in accordance with Federal Law N436-FZ dated 29 December 2010 (edition dated 1 May 2019) "On the protection of children from information that may be harmful to their health"