“Cancel Russian Culture” is cnncelled
News from the music world on Russian compositions and performers being featured in the main venues of Western Europe in the 2023-2024 season
Well, dear friends, the attempt by the Russia-hating ideologues in power in Washington, London and Berlin to stamp out all traces of Russia from the performing arts in the Collective West is doing as poorly as the Ukrainian counter-offensive seems to be doing these past five days. That is the ineluctable conclusion one draws from reading an excellent overview of the musical season 2023-2024 in major European houses written by Marina Ivanova and just published online by Izvestiya.
It is not normally my practice to translate entire articles for republication on my site, and I will not do that here. But I will extract some information from Ivanova’s 9 page piece and reorganize it slightly differently to address a Western audience whereas she compiled much more extensive material to satisfy the interests of her readers in Russia for the career progress of many individual performers whom you are not likely to have heard of.
In her material there are discoveries to be made on several levels. First there are Russian operas and other compositions that will be performed in Europe.
We learn that Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov will be shown at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs Elysées and it will open the season at the Hamburg Opera. Meanwhile a new production of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina is announced for the Berlin Opera.
Other Russian operas that will be presented by the Hamburg company in the new season include Tchaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin and Lady Macbeth of Mtensk by Shostakovich. The latter will be a new staging by the Petersburg cinema director Angelina Nikonova.
Meanwhile in the realm of ballet Zurich will be presenting Stravinsky’s Svadebka to mark the 100th anniversary of its creation and presentation in the West by the Diaghilev troupe. They will reproduce the original staging, decoration and costumes.
Perhaps the most emblematic news in the article concerns opera diva Anna Netrebko, who was thrown out of La Scala productions a year ago in one of the more vicious examples of “cancel Russia” politics at work. At the same time, she was canceled at New York’s Met.
Well, the Met never says sorry. But La Scala evidently does. She will be appearing in the first show of the new season, Verdi’s Don Carlos, in which she sings the role of Elizabeth opposite the Russian bass, Ildar Abdazakov ,who plays King Philip.
As a side note, I see that Abdazakov will also be singing at the Opera Bastille (Paris) in the lead role of Massenet’s Don Quichotte. The orchestra will be conducted by Mikhail Tatarnikov, who for many years was the main conductor of the Mikhailovsky Opera Theater in Petersburg. And as for Netrebko, she will be on stage in Bastille together with her husband Iosif Aivazov in Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
However, Netrebko’s biggest success in validating her preeminent position in European opera and role of standard bearer for Russian culture will surely be her solo recital at the Vienna Opera. The opera management gave her a free hand to select a program that will feature Russian vocal works little known in the West. There will be romances by Rimsky-Korsakov and the evening will end with the scene of the meltdown from the Snow Maiden. Netrebko will be accompanied at the piano by her regular collaborator, Pavel Nebolsin.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
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