Parisian Snow Maiden: into the Bastille woods

Dyed Moroz, Old Man Frost, had released his icy grip - but not his cold east wind - when we arrived in Paris for six days which grew progressively warmer and then decreasingly sunnier over the weekend (Friday was the zenith, a day I'll never forget). And this was the year in which I got to see Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka, The Snow Maiden, La fille de neige, call it what you will where you will, on stage not just for the first but also the second time - after Opera North, the Opéra National de Paris mounted it in more lavish style, and with world-class singers, but not necessarily more truthfully. Gergiev brought a Kirov concert performance to London, what, two decades ago now, from which I remember chiefly the shepherd-boy Lel of the young Yekaterina Semenchuk. She was down to sing Spring Beauty at the Bastille, while a strong counter-tenor many may remember as runner-up in the 2009 Cardiff Singer of the World competition, Ukrainian Yuriy Mynenko, was cast in the trousers role.

He appeared (pictured above in the second of five images for the Opéra by Elisa Haberer); Semenchuk didn't - though it would be hard to imagine a more authoritative bouffanted grande dame than Elena Manistina - and nor did Ramón Vargas, whose role of the aged and here ineffectual Tsar Berendey was taken by another stalwart Ukrainian, Maxin Paster, who cranked up well but didn't get his second aria. Director Dmitry Tcherniakov went for more of the score than John Fulljames in the Opera North production earlier this year, but made some odder cuts: chiefly the best-known number in the score, the Dance of the Tumblers/Skomorokhi, which at least appeared as an Entr'acte in Leeds (as some compensation, we did get the quirky little march of the Berendeyans, and I loved the 'heralds' singing through megaphones).

The imaginative Russian usually ends up bending the scenario to his will in a way that ultimately doesn't always serve the music best. His idea here was that the thuggish merchant Mizgir is incapable of being enchanted, so no magic spell cast on him when he first claps eyes on Snegurochka. Nor can she succumb to his passion in the end, so the great love duet of capitulation becomes a struggle, which deprives the singing of its conviction (Snegurochka and Mizgir pictured below, in the second of four images for the Opéra by Elisa Haberer).

No, this Snow Maiden loves Lel to the end and is seen slowly dying through the second half of the opera (Acts Two, Three and Four). A sacrificial victim like Stravinsky/Roerich/Nijinsky's Chosen Maiden, she doesn't melt with love and the first rays of the sun but drops down dead, lying there at the front of the stage while everyone ignores her in a stomping dance with a fake fire sun rather than a real one at the end.

That didn't work for me, and as a whole, to my surprise, I'd rate Fulljames' balance of magic - those video projections, exquisite - and realism higher. But in every respect the vitally beautiful Aida Garifullina was Snegurochka incarnate; our hearts went out to her from the start. She was, of course, one of my two work-related pretexts for spending nearly a week in Paris; the interview, a total delight, will appear soon on The Arts Desk. That crystalline lyric voice carried even in the horrid vasts of the Bastille Opera (not all the choruses crossed the proscenium arch, though the soloists were mostly clear). And at least Tcherniakov forsook his beloved grim, realistic interiors, which always look good in the director-designer's work but aren't always apt. We entered the auditorium to witness a forest community complete with caravans and dacha-houses, dwarfed by enormous pine trees which rose to the full height of the stage and went back as far as the eye could see. That kept us happy while the Prologue unfolded in a smart (stage?) school where Madame Spring put her proteges delightfully through their paces as a chorus of birds (pictured below).

Veteran Vladimir Ognovenko - whom I think I last saw at the Bastille as a gruff Kutuzov in Prokofiev's War and Peace - is as easy on stage as Manistina, plausibly an old couple whose late-flowering love-affair went awry. Mynenko sings as artistically as any counter-tenor could as long-haired, slightly repulsive Lel, but I'd still prefer a fruity mezzo; Heather Lowe for Opera North looked just like a teenage boy, but didn't have the dark Slavic colour). There was luxury casting for the 'other' soprano, sensuous, experienced village girl Kupava, in the shape of dramatic soprano Martina Serafin, whose Marschallin in Vienna was Crespinesque and who totally redeemed an otherwise dreadful production of a dreadful opera, Giordano's Andrea Chénier, in Zurich (I've not seen her Tosca and wonder whether she really still has the top for Turandot). Neither as youthful nor as hilariously crazy as Elin Pritchard in Leeds, she still produced beautiful sounds and relaxed, intelligent acting. That's her in the middle of the ensemble scene pictured below. The real let-down was baritone Thomas Johannes Meyer's Mizgir, brutal and constricted beyond the call of duty.

I wasn't entirely convinced by the conducting of the Mikhailovsky Theatre's Mikhail Tatarnikov; as with Leo McFall in Leeds, there were times when the score could afford to expand more opulently, and the last duet felt rushed - didn't help that it was cut in half. The first oboe was having a bad night, too, with many notes not coming out. But perhaps the most bewitching scene in the entire score, the desperate Snegurochka's summoning of her vernal mamma, really glowed, and it produced the most beautiful tableau, too, as the forest constantly revolved. For symmetry's sake, it might have been better to return to the school room, and the forest was stuck there for the scene in Berendey's court, too; but this was the highlight for most of the audience, and it's the scene that Garifullina loves best, too.

Anyway, I'm glad Tcherniakov is making a case for the best Rimsky-Korsakov in Paris, rekindling earlier glory days at the beginning of the 20th century, and we need it at the Royal Opera too. High time they engaged Garifullina before she's booked up entirely; and in earlier days a complete Decca recording would have been built around such perfect casting, She told me in our wonderful interview on Sunday that her next wish is to sing Manon in Vienna, but I'd be even more delighted if somewhere like Glyndebourne would stage Strauss's Daphne for her; I'm sure she could manage that lighter soprano role among his operas already. So, exciting times ahead, and they couldn't happen to a lovelier person. I'll put in a link here when the interview's up and running; and needless to say much remains to be written here about Paris in the springtime, even if I haven't finished with Oslo, Amsterdam, Gloucester or Tallinn yet...

Tcherniakov: redeemed by Macbeth

To be fair, it was already a draw from my perspective: two productions which created their own, consistent visions and two which were a bit of a dog's dinner. Now the balance has swung back in favour of Dmitri Tcherniakov, in my view the most interesting opera director to have emerged since Richard Jones (and his design sense is singular, too).

Tcherniakov first stunned us with a Eugene Onegin in which the heroine comes across as a manic-depressive and the duel's a nasty accident in a dining room with a gun (all the action takes place around tables) and a production of Prokofiev's The Gambler set in a blue, contemporary hotel and every inch as compelling as Jones's more kaleidoscopic Covent Garden staging. Then he lost me at times with Don Giovanni from Aix as a family saga (Donna Anna is Zerlina's ma, so out with all the class distinctions) and the recent Simon Boccanegra at ENO, good in the early stages but seeming to lose the plot towards the end.

So how glad I was to have reconvened the City Lit Opera in Focus group on Monday for a free end-of-term screening of this Paris Opera Macbeth (production shots via the company and Ruth Walz). Tcherniakov's 2009 Verdi is certainly more of a piece than this year's Boccanegra and veers between a grim small-town square full of locals (not witches) and the Macbeth mansion; aerial shots on a screen establish where we are and, later, how order has broken down.

The crowd scenes don't appear to work at first; why no weird sisters, why have the men mime the lines of the women's chorus too? But they begin to take off as Banquo is murdered in the thick of the crowd and Macbeth comes back for a consultation, only to be presented with the return of bobble-hatted little Fleance.


The 'Patria oppressa' chorus, though not as well sung as some, is as dramatically moving as it can be, with the people bringing with them treasured objects from their deserted homes and then Macduff (Stefano Secco, excellent) tearing his heart out from a child's play pen.

In fact all of the set-pieces work superbly as dramatic monologues. Lady Macbeth - and there can be none better or more assured than the never-disappointing Violeta Urmana - delivers her two imperious cabalettas to her husband, setting up the relationship between them more assuredly than Verdi officially permits. She does party tricks to the Brindisi, with increasing desperation (who knew this woman could act? She's normally seen in tatty old revivals where she only has to stand and deliver). And 'Pieta, rispetto, amore' really is done in extremis by Dimitris Tiliakos, who starts with an over-pronounced vibrato but quickly gets better and better: this is a real characterisation, which is more than can be said for Simon Keenlyside's inexplicably muted performance in the recent Covent Garden revival.


The last two scenes take place in the despoiled mansion; Lady M's somnambulistic antics involve doctor and lady in waiting much more than usual, with all the earlier gestures and party-tricks brought back meaningfully, while Macbeth gets his 'Mal per me' from 1847 in an otherwise 1860s edition (no ballet) and is forced to hear the choruses proclaim victory offstage.


There's a rumour that Tcherniakov couldn't get the chorus to act, so left them in the wings and replaced them with actors who then couldn't mime, and in turn replaced those with twelve extra singers...but you couldn't fit a full chorus in the Macbeth room anyway, and it makes dramatic sense. So I don't buy that, unless you accept that the Paris Opera Chorus isn't up to much and he made the most of that. Otherwise, it's musically resplendent, though young Teodor Currentzis does like extremes and tosses his locks rather more often than is seemly in a disciplined maestro. On the evidence of this and his work on the world premiere of Weinberg's The Passenger - pity he isn't conducting the ENO staging in September - he's a major talent.