A taste of Hollywood at the Mariinsky
John Malkovich, Anna Netrebko and Ingeborga Dapkunaite are among this year’s Stars of the White Nights.
Published: May 18, 2011 (Issue # 1656)
V. Baranovsky
Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra will perform ‘Sadko’ in the Veliky Novgorod Kremlin as part of the festival.
Guiseppe Verdi’s “Aida” in an unorthodox rendition by Switzerland’s Daniele Finzi Pasca — the name behind Cirque du Soleil’s globe-trotting show “Corteo” — is one of the two biggest catches in the program of the 19th international Stars of the White Nights festival that kicks off on May 23 and will run for nine weeks.
“Aida” will be shown at the Mariinsky Concert Hall just twice, on June 11 and 14.
“Aida was conceived especially for the concert hall of the Mariinsky Theater as a vivid and most accessible production that can be performed frequently,” Valery Gergiev, the company’s artistic director, told reporters at a news conference last week. “It is not the sort of show that we produce with one season of performance in mind or with the aim of leasing it out. We expect the production to repeat the success of Alain Maratrat’s rendition of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ that has been shown more than 100 times since it was premiered in December 2007.”
Another unmissable event is Benjamin Britten’s opera “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged by Claudia Solti and featuring world-renowned bass Willard White in one of the main roles (July 21 and 27). According to Gergiev, “these opera premieres will embellish the festival.” Claudia Solti is the daughter of the late renowned conductor Sir Georg Solti, and has an extensive background in cinema. As Gergiev stressed, Claudia Solti “will be staging an opera that her father loved very much.”
On June 20, the festival will present the Russian premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “A Sea of Dreams Did Breathe on Me… Songs of Reverie and Nostalgia,” a cycle of twenty-one songs for soprano, mezzo-soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra set to verse by Polish poets.
Alexander Basta
Pianist Rudolph Buchbinder.
“Krzysztof Penderecki and I are friends and have worked together for a long time, including on the world premiere of this work which I conducted in Warsaw,” said Gergiev.
The festival opens on May 23 with the glamorous soprano Anna Netrebko singing the lead role of Adina in Gaetano Donizetti’s sparkling opera “L’Elisir d’Amore” that premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in January this year to become essentially a one-soprano show that won sour reviews owing to a devastating lack of ensemble.
The festival’s program this year incorporates about 115 performances of some of the world’s most sought after artists, including actor John Malkovich, pianist Rudolph Buchbinder, conductor Paavo Jarvi, violinists Vadim Repin and Leonidas Kavakos and conductor Kurt Masur, along with Willard White.
Hollywood star Malkovich will be back in town for one performance on July 10 of “The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer,” in which he portrays the charming Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger. Written and directed by Michael Sturminger, “The Infernal Comedy” brings together Malkovich, several sopranos and a baroque orchestra to tell the story of Unterweger, who killed 11 prostitutes in Europe and the U.S. by strangling them with their own bras.
On July 11 and 13, the Malkovich and Sturminger duo will present a new show, “Giacomo Variations,” about the escapades of Giacomo Casanova, again involving a baroque orchestra under the baton of Martin Haselbock, but this time featuring popular film actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite.
FOR SPT
Violinist Vadim Repin.
“The Giacomo Variations was billed as an opera play but scarcely served the needs of either music or theater,” read a review of the production in The Sydney Morning Herald. The show was performed in Sydney in January this year as part of a theater festival.
“The idea was harmless enough — mixing conquests and confessions from the memoirs of the 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova with the love stories from the three great operas Mozart wrote with the comparably flamboyant librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ ‘Don Giovanni’ and ‘Cosi fan tutte.’ But the concept of the director, Michael Sturminger, was more the material of cabaret and revue than a work for festival star billing,” the critic wrote.
On June 13, the Mariinsky company will travel to Veliky Novgorod for a one-off open-air performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s classic opera “Sadko” inside the town’s ancient Kremlin.
The theater began talks about the production several years ago at an early stage of collaboration with the regions around St Petersburg. Gergiev believes that “Sadko” should be performed in other Russian towns, thus fulfilling the demands of the Mariinsky Theater’s regional program of concerts. The theater also plans to perform in Pskov, Petrozavodsk, Murmansk, Arkhangelsk and Kaliningrad.
A full schedule of the Stars of the White Nights festival is available at www.mariinsky.ru