RIMSKY-KORSAKOV The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronya • Vitaly Panfilov ( Prince Vsevolod ); Tatiana Monogarova ( Fevronya ); Mikhail Gubsky ( Grishka Kuterma ); Mikhail Kazakov ( Prince Yury ); Gevorg Hakobyan ( Fyodor Poyarok ); Marika Gulordava ( Page ); Valery Gilmanov ( Bedyay ); Alexander Naumenko ( Burunday ); Alexander Vedernikov, cond; Cagliari Th O & Ch • NAXOS 2.110277/78 (2 DVDs: 187:28) Live: Cagliari 5/2–4/2008


I wanted to see this video because, for many years, I’ve heard exorbitant praise from certain critics regarding Kitezh , yet in listening to the commercial recording conducted by Valery Gergiev I felt let down. The music seemed to me flat and characterless, lacking drama, development, and momentum. Surely, I said to myself, a good stage production would change my mind, as it did with Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina.


Yet opinions on The Invisible City of Kitezh (to abbreviate its title) are divided. Although many critics wax ecstatic over Rimsky-Korsakov’s magnificent orchestration for this work, few outside Russia are very impressed by the opera as a whole. It is an overlong, derivative grand opera in which two old tales of magic were welded together by librettist Vladimir Belsky, and finally presented intact in 1908. Even the first Russian audiences didn’t care much for it, finding it very old-fashioned in concept and musical style as well as overly rambling, though it is still periodically revived, mostly within Russia.


This production gives us a rare glimpse of the opera as performed in Italy. The audience reaction is not enthusiastic; on the contrary, when the applause comes at the ends of acts, it sounds like perhaps 80 to 100 people half-heartedly clapping.


One glance at the production tells you why. Although it is not Regietheater —the characters are, thankfully, clad in traditional-looking costumes—Eimuntas Nekro?ius’s idiotic staging has too much symbolism and too little that resembles reality. The first act, set in the “woods,” presents a stage littered with “wooden” structures, bird houses and the like. Get it? Woods. The presentation of Little Kitezh, where the maiden Fevronya is to marry Prince Vsevolod, is cluttered with giant, tinfoil-covered bell-like objects with people popping out of their tops. Get it? Bells. This kind of idiocy continues throughout a production of a work in which the music itself is also static and rarely wedded to the text. In act IV, scene 1, where Fevronya and Grishka are supposed to be wandering in the woods, what you see is a plain blue-tiled floor with two Erector-set structures in the background. Apparently, Nekro?ius ran out of birdhouses, but not to despair! When Grishka runs off into the woods and Fevronya is left alone, two giant, hideous bird creatures sneak out of the woods and behind her as she sleeps. Perhaps Nekro?ius has seen too many of the Alien movies. In the final scene, supposed to represent Kitezh triumphant, the stage is filled with objects that look like rocket silos.


Musically, many passages sound like leavings from Boris Godunov, and not good leavings at that, so even when the singers are excellent the plot crawls along. It is an opera more about characters who stand there and sing than about characters creating a musical drama. Compare, for instance, the first act to the similar situation in Verdi’s Don Carlo. A prince meets a beautiful woman in the woods, and they fall in love. Verdi miraculously manages to wed lovely music, some of it even memorable, to a flexible musical structure in which the orchestra comments on or moves the action. Rimsky-Korsakov creates a static structure wedded to pretty but undistinguished melodies that just toodle along, and do so for half an hour.


Moreover, the plot is remarkably dismal and depressing for a magic or fairy-tale opera. Everyone sings about death even before the Tartars invade Russia, and several characters die except Fevronya and the seedy drunkard Grishka Kuterma, who becomes a traitor, willing to turn Kitezh over to invading Tartars and finger Fevronya as the snitch just to save his own worthless hide. Prince Vsevolod goes off to battle for Kitezh, not to win it but to die in it. (I’m guessing he flunked military school.) He does so, but returns in the second half of act IV as a ghost, and at the end of the opera Fevronya marries the ghost. And you talk about overlong … each of the first two acts runs over a half hour, but each of the last two acts runs more than an hour apiece.


Getting to the performance, Tatiana Monogarova is simply magnificent as Fevronya, not only vocally but histrionically, which is important because this is a rare Russian opera in that the soprano dominates everything. Here is a woman who fully understands how to inhabit a role. You come to believe wholeheartedly in her character within the first five minutes she is onstage, and she holds you in her thrall to the end. As for her voice, it is a remarkably rich lyric soprano, close to spinto in power, exactly the kind of voice Rimsky wanted for this part. Her midrange, in fact, reminds me strongly of Mirella Freni at her best, only with more power. The top range is not as lovely as Freni’s, but it has its own interesting luster and more metal. Monogarova made her American debut as Lisa in Pique Dame in Houston in 2010, and also began singing Cio-Cio-San around the same time in Europe. She is signed with IMG, and I really do wish her well in what I hope will be a major career.


Vitaly Panfilov, as Prince Vsevolod, is neither an interesting actor nor a particularly fine singer. The voice is fluttery, dry, and percussive. He sings on pitch and phrases well, but that is all one can say of him. His stage presence registers somewhere between nil and mediocre. On the other hand, Mikhail Gubsky as the nefarious Grishka Kuterma is a superb stage actor, though his voice is strictly that of a good comprimario. Nevertheless, the world needs good comprimarios, and he is certainly one of them. His pathetic wheedling is completely believable.


A word of praise is also due Marika Gulordava in the somewhat thankless role of the Page. The Page is analogous to Cassandra in Les Troyens or the Simpleton in Boris, someone who warns of danger to come. Though her role is important it is not as long as either of the other two, yet Gulordava is simply stunning in her one big scene. Her voice is not as beautiful as Monogarova’s, but it has a laser-beam focus with a bright, perhaps over-brilliant top. As a musician and singing actress she is first-rate. I also hope for her to have a good career. Mikhail Kazakov, singing the role of Vesvolod’s father, Prince Yury, has a nice voice but an uneven flutter and a constricted low range, a real detriment for a Russian bass.


Alexander Vedernikov is a fine conductor who obviously loves and understands this music. He brings out all of the wonderful orchestral subtleties of the score and moves the opera about as well as can be expected under the circumstances. Indeed, his conducting here is finer for this particular work than Gergiev’s.


My copy of the DVD may have been defective, but all through the first two acts the video is out of synch with the audio, as if one were watching something in which the video was on a two-second tape delay. On the second DVD, most of it is in synch, yet there are still strange moments when the picture freezes for a couple of seconds, only to jump ahead and eventually catch up with the audio.


Thus there are good and bad points to be taken into consideration in approaching both the work and the performance, but if you are fond of Kitezh I would recommend this for the excellent acting of a handful of participants and the excellent singing of the two sopranos.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley


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THE LEGEND OF THE INVISIBLE CITY OF KITEZH AND THE MAIDEN FEVRONYA

Opera in 4 Acts. Sung in Russian
Libretto by Vladimir I. Belsky

Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich – Mikhail Kazakov
Hereditary prince Vsevolod Yuryevich – Vitaly Panfilov
Fevronya – Tatiana Monogarova
Grishka Kuterma – Mikhail Gubsky
Fyodor Poyarok – Gevorg Hakobyan
Page – Marika Gulordava
Two notables – Gianluca Floris, Marek Kalbus
Bedyay – Valery Gilmanov
Burunday – Alexander Naumenko

Orchestra e Coro del Teatro Lirico di Cagliari
(chorus master: Fulvio Fogliazza)
Alexander Vedernikov, conductor

Eimuntas Nekrošius, stage director
Marius Nekrošius, set designer
Nadezhda Gultiayeva, costume designer
Audrius Jankauskas, lighting designer

Recorded live from the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, Sardinia, 2 and 4 May 2008

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo / Dolby Digital 5.0 / DTS 5.0
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English
Running time: 187 mins
No. of DVDs: 2 (DVD 5 + DVD 9)

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov arranged his most famous work, Scheherazade, and the little jolly Neapolitan Song, op. 63, for piano four hands.

Having recently recorded the symphonies of both Glazunov and Rachmaninov, we continue our Russian theme with the first of a series of recordings of Rimsky-Korskov's symphonies. These are performed by the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Kees Bakels. The present disc couples one of Rimsky-Korsakov's most popular pieces with a symphony that deserves a much wider audience. Both works swhow their author's fertile, often fantastical imagination as welll as the mastery of orchestration for which he is renowned. While Scheherazade is in every orchestra's repertoire and most music lovers' collections, Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonies inexplicably remain under-recorded and appear infrequently on the concert platform. Both works exemplify the Romantic notion of programme music (where extra-musical references are explicitly related to what we hear). Rimsky-Korsakov had a vivid sense of colour that brings his programmes to life and which make his works highly appealing. The disc once again illustrates just how good the Malyasian Philharmonic Orchestra is under its founding conductor Kees Bakels.

This is a Spoken Word album:
"Sinbad" and other exotic tales narrated by Bernard Cribbins over music by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The old Tzar Dodon, tired of ruling his country, manipulated by his political advisors - among which the obscure Astrologer - and showing little interest in protecting his kingdom against foreign agression, relies on a magic Golden Cockerel to warn him in case of an attack. But when the Cockerel tells him of his own defeat, the Tzar quickly falls in love with his enemy, the beautiful Tzaritza of Shemakha, who easily convinces him to surrender his empire by making him propose to her. A cruel and sardonic fairytale, Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel draws from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, and undoubtedly counts among the most subversive works in the history of music. A very direct attack against autocracy, stupidity and political inertia, it was censored and premiered only in 1909, one year after Rimsky-Korsakov's death. This new production from the The�tre de la Monnaie was imagined by Laurent Pelly. Drawing from the modernity of Rimsky-Korsakov's musical and dramatic imagination, the ambiguities of it's specular structure, and it's underlying reflection on language, manipulation and absurdity, the French stage director underlies the heavily symbolical aspects of this fierce and pitiless tale, all the while remembering both it's historical context and it's universal philosophical depth... French conductor Alain Altinoglu works wonders with the The�tre de la Monnaie Symphonic Orchestra, and reaffirms his strong affinities with Russian music, which were already made clear in the Tchaikovsky dyptich Iolanta / The Nutcracker at the Paris Opera in 2015.

This selection is a High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) recording.

In November 1900, the music journalist Yevgeny Petro-vsky gave Rimsky-Korsakov his libretto, entitled Prince Ivan, which is loosely based on Russian folk tales about a mean and ugly wizard. Despite being initially interested in the text the composer eventually rejected it, put off by its unfathomable symbolism. However, in the summer of the following year the score of Wagner’s Siegfried pro-vided inspiration for fresh and innovative harmonic ideas, which he decided to include in a work dealing with motifs of black magic. With the help of his daughter Sofia, he wrote his own script based on Petrovsky’s original, and as early as in spring of 1902 he had a one-act opera in three scenes ready – Kashchey the Immortal – which was successfully staged in Moscow before the year had ended. The work is presented in a brilliant new interpretation on this new release.

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Christmas Eve / Night on Mount Triglav

In the 13th century, the rich merchants of Novgorod mock the dreams of far-away journeys and of commercial conquests brought forth by Sadko, a musician and singer. But Volkhova, the Sea King’s daughter, is enchanted by Sadko’s voice, and promises to help him fulfill his dreams... Sadko is a decisive work in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s aesthetic evolution. As in many operas, the composer draws his artistic material from Russian folk and fairytales, but also from old musical and poetic forms. The result is a prodigious opera, whose modernity - both dramatic and musical - erupts from the fabulous resources of traditional Russian epics, but also from the wonders of the marine universe, close to his former navigator self’s heart. A subtle analyst of the slavic soul, stage director Dmitri Tcherniakov comes back to the great stage of the Bolshoi Theater and devises a surprising production that perfectly underlines the ambiguities of this paradoxical opera, between past and present, fantasy and reality. He surrounds himself with magnificent Russian soprano Aida Garifullina, but also some of his favorite singers : Mikhail Petrenko, Ekaterina Semenchuk... In the pit and at the head of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, young Russian conductor Timur Zangiev breathes in this little-know masterpiece all the energy, all the poetry, and all the passion it requires.

In the 13th century, the rich merchants of Novgorod mock the dreams of far-away journeys and of commercial conquests brought forth by Sadko, a musician and singer. But Volkhova, the Sea King’s daughter, is enchanted by Sadko’s voice, and promises to help him fulfill his dreams... Sadko is a decisive work in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s aesthetic evolution. As in many operas, the composer draws his artistic material from Russian folk and fairytales, but also from old musical and poetic forms. The result is a prodigious opera, whose modernity - both dramatic and musical - erupts from the fabulous resources of traditional Russian epics, but also from the wonders of the marine universe, close to his former navigator self’s heart. A subtle analyst of the slavic soul, stage director Dmitri Tcherniakov comes back to the great stage of the Bolshoi Theater and devises a surprising production that perfectly underlines the ambiguities of this paradoxical opera, between past and present, fantasy and reality. He surrounds himself with magnificent Russian soprano Aida Garifullina, but also some of his favorite singers : Mikhail Petrenko, Ekaterina Semenchuk... In the pit and at the head of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, young Russian conductor Timur Zangiev breathes in this little-know masterpiece all the energy, all the poetry, and all the passion it requires.

Note: The Blu-ray version is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera is a fanciful fairytale, yet at the same time a parable on repression and political conceit. The peasant girl Fevroniya’s prayer that the city of Kitezh becomes invisible, thus protecting it from Tatar attack, is magically heeded. The girl herself, however, is captured by the invaders. The leitmotifs and highly expressive musical tone-painting tell the story, based on a pantheist world view, almost on their own. Grand crowd scenes contrast with a internal treatment similar to the music dramas of Richard Wagner. Marc Albrecht conducts the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the dramatic staging comes from the renowned Russian director, Dmitri Tcherniakov.

Recorded live at the De Nederlandse Opera, February 2012

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov
THE LEGEND OF THE INVISIBLE CITY OF KITEZH

Recorded live at the De Nederlandse Opera, February 2012

• Picture format: NTSC 16:9
• Sound format: LPCM 2.0 / DTS 5.1
• Region code: 0 (worldwide)
• Subtitles: English, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Korean
• Running time: 187 mins
• No. of DVDs: 2
• No. of Blu-ray discs: 1

REVIEW:

The score, premiered in 1907, is filled with rich late romantic music, none of it virtuosic in the bel canto sense, but all demanding strong voices able to cut through the large orchestra. The orchestral and choral work is excellent. The long leading role of Fevroniya requires a great deal of stamina as well as a strong lyric-spinto soprano. Svetlana Ignatovich fills the bill vocally quite well, and her acting radiates the goodness and innocence of this idealized woman. Her Prince, handsome tenor Maxim Aksenov, is a perfect physical fit for the part; and his voice is pleasant enough for what is not really the leading part. As his father, Vladimir Vaneev displays an excellent bassbaritone and creates a believable benevolent leader. The baritone Alexey Markov has plenty of voice for his Act III scene relating the horrors of the Act II violence. Other strong contributions come from Gennady Bezzubenkov as a street singer, Mayram Sokolova as a fearful mother, and Vladimir Ognovenko as a frighteningly evil leader of the Tatars.

Best of all is tenor John Daszak as Grishka— a great role. The man is a drunken, almost amoral reveler; later, he is beset by guilt and hallucinations. Daszak makes the most of the role, from the man’s early disregard for anyone but himself to his need for comfort and understanding at the end. He so completely creates the character that his singing and acting can’t be separated; they work together completely to create a memorable portrayal.

I certainly would recommend this production to anyone wanting to become familiar with a major Russian work that isn’t performed that often outside Russia, though I would not be surprised to hear that this production (also done in Barcelona and Milan) would be available at other houses. The booklet has a fairly good synopsis and a good essay on the work, but no timings. There is also a bonus track with some interesting comments by the conductor and director.

-- American Record Guide

..."Dance of the Firebird"...is much more nimble and airy in Leonard Bernstein's performance, possibly because the American opts for the better-known 1919 Suite which uses a reduced orchestration... Bernstein delivers a brilliant account of the score...

-- Erik Levi, BBC Music Magazine [reviewing the Firebird Suite]

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Bernstein treats Scheherazade as the "Symphonic Suite" it's billed as, barely pausing between movements—the old Columbia LP has no bands on either side. This was the kind of personalized, excitable interpretation that made Bernstein beloved to many, though it won't be to everyone's taste... His shaping of the violin and cello statements of the theme in "The Young Prince and the Young Princess" is exquisite. The violin solos are played warmly and effectively by John Corigliano (the composer's father and, for 23 years, concertmaster of the Philharmonic.)... It's difficult to imagine Bernstein devotees not having these performances already. But for others who have missed them in their various incarnations, or want to replace aging LPs—don't deny yourself some considerable pleasure.

-- Andrew Quint, FANFARE [5/1999, reviewing Scheherazade]

Rimsky-Korsakov´s musical legacy made a huge impact and stretches far into the twentieth century. Even if the language barrier makes full understanding difficult, some of his operas can still prove deeply moving. This series brings together for the first time Rimsky-Korsakov’s entire operatic oeuvre, including the fragment Nausicaa and recordings that have survived of Vera Sheloga and Servilia, all in authentic performances featuring singers from the Golden Age of the Bolshoi Theatre. Some of them can be heard here on album for the very first time. Time and again, they show that Rimsky-Korsakov is one of the greatest Russian composers who ever lived. His musical colleague and near contemporary Claude Debussy (1862-1918) paid homage to him in the most wonderful manner: “The magic of the themes and the shimmering brilliance of the orchestration and rhythm cannot be expressed in mere words. Show me someone who fails to be moved by the power of this music. Making that silly sound with one’s hands ... is certainly not sufficient to thank a man who has given us minutes of pure happiness.

SET CONTENT HIGHLIGHTS (Complete Operas):

• Pskovityanka (The Maid of Pskov) • Mayskaya noch' (May Night) • The Snow Maiden • Mlada • Noch'pered rozhdestvom (Christmas Eve) • Sadko • Mozart and Salieri, Op. 48 • Pan Voyevoda, Op. 59 • Skazaniye o nevidimom grade Kitezhe i deve Fevronii (Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya) • Zolotoy petushok (The Golden Cockerel)

REVIEW:

This collection features some remarkable performances which in turn have great singers in starring roles – the likes of Natalia Shpiller, Ivan Kozlovsky, Georgi Nelepp, Pavel Lisitsian, Alexander Pirogov, Mark Reizen, and Andrei Ivanov with conductors such as Nikolai Golovanov, Alexander Gauk, and Samuil Samosud. Mlada is in stereo (under Evgeny Svetlanov) and includes the sort of imaginative sound palette that Rimsky also employed for Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. The sound has its ups and downs, but if you’re after authentic performances of Russian opera, you’ll be well catered for.

–Gramophone