Travel Notes, St Petersburg, April-May 2024: second installment
When our Moscow friends visited us in our Pushkin apartment several days ago, Lyudmila gazed out the balcony windows at the green field opposite us, but thinking more likely of the Catherine Park on the other side of our residential complex, commented that it was a pity we spend so little time here and that we miss the summers when it would be especially delightful.
I responded that it is precisely the summers that we prefer to miss, because Nature exists most everywhere but the concentration of High Culture that you have in Petersburg is available only in a very few cities in the world, and this High Culture, in its performing arts dimension, shuts down in summers and comes alive in mid-autumn, running to late spring. That is the time period during which we schedule our trips to Petersburg.
Two days ago we had our first tasting session of this Petersburg High Culture when we went to see a play in the Alexandrinsky National Drama Theater, an historic building just next to the city’s main boulevard, the Nevsky Prospekt in the very center of the city. But it was not the finely renovated building or the well turned out young ladies who constituted a substantial and very noticeable part of the audience that made the evening memorable. It was the remarkable play that we saw, The Birth of Stalin, written and stage managed by the theater’s director Valery Fokin. This play first premiered in 2019 but is still drawing a full house.
There are many academics and journalists in the West who tell us that there is a revival of Stalinism in Russia, for which they, naturally, blame the current ‘dictator’ Vladimir Putin. However, this is just ignorant blather. The Birth of Stalin puts the lie to their slander. The overarching view of Stalin and his fellow revolutionaries in Georgia is that expressed by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel The Demons: they were rats, despicable immoral rats.
The play is about how the seminary student in the Georgian city of Gori, Iosif Dzhugashvili, “Soso” as he was called, a fellow with outstanding grades in the Old and New Testament, became the tyrant we know as Stalin. The time period for this transformation is from his leading a terror attack on banks to finance the Revolution that killed dozens of gendarmes up to the time of his arrest and domestic exile. The dialogues direct attention to his cruelty and to how he put himself in the place of God. As Fokin explained in an interview: Stalin saw the Revolution as the highest form of justice. “I was captivated at how for this sake he overstepped all bounds and began to kill supposed enemies, then to kill friends, and then to kill everyone. That is what is so frightening.”
Our evening of drama was exceptional for us, since we are devotees of opera, an art form for which Petersburg is one of the most important homes globally. Quality is generally assured by the city’s celebrated conductors, singers and orchestras. What raises all this to a higher plateau is quantity. Petersburg is one of the few cities in Europe which has repertory opera houses, meaning that a show is going on stage every evening. That contrasts with the stagione system that is commonplace in Western Europe, where a given theater presents a given number of operas each season and they are performed for several weeks straight followed by a fallow period before the next opera is put on.
Petersburg has a world famous company in the Mariinsky Theater, which itself has three venues – the original 19th century building, the Mariinsky II, a theater built and put into operation early in this century, and a concert hall which is used to present operas without stage sets and costumes. On any given day all three have shows, and on occasion there may be both an afternoon and an evening performance on offer.
Moreover, the Mariinsky is not the only major company in the city. There is also the Maly Opera Theater, which puts on some excellent productions and has its own audience, which may be described as wealthier and less tradition minded. The Mariinsky, by contrast, reaches out to all strata of Petersburg society with special concessionary prices for young people, for seniors, and so on.
It is not my intention to turn this edition of Travel Notes into a review of the operas and one operetta for which I procured tickets on this visit. However, I do intend to describe how leading institutions of High Culture are faring in this city under conditions of “cancel Russia” imposed by the West ever since the launch of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
In Western Europe, the most vicious forms of “cancel Russia” are waning. Some Russian performers like opera star Anna Netrebko are again being invited to leading stages. But foreign tours in the West by leading Russian companies remain unthinkable, and artists based in the West are very, very rare birds here now.
Nonetheless, my overriding impression is that Russian opera, at least, has reached the level of ‘sovereignty’ that Mr Putin is seeking for the country as a whole. It is self-sufficient and can offer the concert going public first quality performances from its own human resources without invited guests from abroad. Let me be more specific: over the past thirty years, Russia’s trainers for the stage have brought local talent up to world standards. The young singers who now take the stage at the Mariinsky are in full command of the technique of Italian opera, for example.
The days of the “Slavic warblers” are gone. The days when shop-worn, over-aged Western stars that were brought here in the 1990s to entice snobs to buy opera seats are also gone. I think, for example, of how Montserrat Caballé was brought out of retirement to perform in Moscow and Petersburg back in the 1990s when her voice was in rather sad shape.
Big name Russian stars of retirement age are also no longer needed to sell seats. The performance of Aida which I saw the other night at the Mariinsky had singers for Aida and Amneris who were making their debut in these roles. Their names told us nothing. But they possessed outstanding technique and big voices that could fill The Met.
If I was drawn to that show, which used a 15 year old staging by a Petersburg stage manager whom you have never heard of but who happens to be a friend of ours, it was because the conductor of the evening was one of those brave and dedicated musicians, originally from America, but long based in Russia, Christian Knapp. His direction is world class and we knew he would work only with a quality cast, which was the case. I urge readers to read Knapp’s biography in his Wikipedia entry. The man is extraordinary, and it is a credit to both him and to the Mariinsky management that he has chosen to remain here despite all the curses that must be directed against him by Western culture warriors.
Though the vintage staging may seem quaint, apart from the top rate singing of all the lead performers, there was one feature of the show that puts it head and shoulders above the Aida that you are likely to see anywhere in the West: the dancing. Those of you who are familiar with Aida know that there are large interludes for dance in the score, especially in the scene of the victorious returning Egyptian army. In most opera theaters these sections are either cut back or accompanied by videos since they have no dancers on tap. The Mariinsky is one of the few opera houses in the world that is also home to one of the best ballet companies in the world and its talents are used extensively in this Aida to great advantage. Moreover, the traditions of Russian dance steps going back to the early 20th century are inserted, including a dance sequence that Ballets Russes impresario Diaghilev would be proud of, drawing as it does on his chief choreographer for a time, Mikhail Fokin.
In the performance of Rigoletto that I saw in Mariinsky-2, it was, on the contrary, the widely known and highly regarded Mongolian baritone Ariunbaator Ganbaatur in the lead role that persuaded me to buy a ticket, not the little known but effective local conductor, whose name was revealed only on the day of the performance.
As for Ganbaatur, who bears the title ‘invited soloist’ in the Mariinsky, where he made his debut in 2016, he would be known to Western music lovers as the winner of the BBC Singer of the World competition in Cardiff, Wales in 2017 and before that, in 2015 he took gold at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. With soloists like this in their midst, Russian opera houses will keep their luster for years to come whatever arbiters of taste may say or do in New York or Washington.
My point here is that over the thirty years up to the recent rupture of relations, the Russians drew from the West what was needed to update their performance skills so that they can go it alone for as long as necessary, until the West comes to its senses and restores ties.
Ahead of me before departure for Belgium, I will have the opportunity to sample Russian singing at one notch below full opera when I hear Kalman’s operetta Princess Csardas at the Theater of Musical Comedy. That genre is another local tradition which goes back far in time and is doing fine today.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024