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Chess and vocal game
The Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theatre (Ural Opera Ballet) presented the premiere of the 113th season of Efrem Podgatz's opera Alice Through the Looking Glass, staged by Elizaveta Korneeva. Georgy Kovalevsky watched the adventures of Lewis Carroll's heroine from Yekaterinburg.
If one were to imagine the entire appreciation of Russia's most accomplished living writer, Yefrem Podgaits, who recently celebrated his 75th birthday, would undoubtedly be at the forefront. His operas, ballets, and musicals are performed from Magadan to Krasnodar, and his numerous instrumental and choral works are performed by students of schools and art colleges, and musicians of academic ensembles. In the contemporary cultural landscape, Podgaits is like a modern-day Dmitry Kabalevsky, with "songs, marches, and dances" — the ability to express a variety of emotions through genres while composing memorable, unobtrusively spinning melodies. On your head.
The opera "Alice Through the Looking Glass" is the first in the list of theatrical works by Podgaits. This work was created by the 30-year-old composer in the late 70s - early 80s and already fully reflected his style. The librettist was the poet and linguist Vladimir Orel, who at that time translated carols and felt exactly what was needed for musical performance. Eight scenes of the opera reflect 11 actions that the main character must perform in order to turn from a pawn into a queen and return to her world before the clock strikes 13 times (not in the original source). . By shortening several chapters and eliminating several characters, the author eliminated unnecessary details from the plot and added conditions to the number of tests. This is done so that you understand the absurd poetry invented by the chess king (Shaltai-Boltai becomes the translator). - Additional intrigue has been added.
The musical director of the current Yekaterinburg production was the chief conductor of the Ural Opera Konstantin Chudovsky, who knew Yefrem Podgats from the time of his conservatory practice in the children's choir "Vesna". The orchestra depicted the sleeping Humpty Dumpty with a variety of tones, from the sparkling passages of the piccolo flute (an image of flying insects) to the guttural melody of the contrabassoon. The shape of the violin emphasized the elastic rhythmic patterns, the clarinet seemed to depict the meowing of the kitten with whom Alice spoke in the first scene, and the whistling flexatone personified the mysterious transformation. The harmony with the choir was wonderful, and not only with the adults (choirmaster Alexei Petrov), but also with the children (choirmaster Elena Nakhishova). In the third scene, after walking along the trays in the garden, singing flowers appeared. stage. .
For the premiere performance, the theater chose three solo casts, unexpectedly different. In Olga Semenishcheva's interpretation, Alisa was more expressive and vulnerable (one of the peaks of character development is the touching arioso from the sixth film "Maybe We Really Are in Someone's Dream"). Luiza Zhuleva endowed the heroine with greater philosophical detachment. Olga Starodubova endowed her with childish wisdom and prudence. Maxim Shulikov, who played the role of the White Knight in two episodes, showed himself in the role of a touching eccentric fool who sacrificed himself to help Alisa get to the right square in time and return home safely. In "Shaltai-Boltai" by Oleg Budaratsky and the works of Mikhail Korobeynikov, the image of a mysterious priest is mentioned, while in the works of Vladislav Troshin he appears more endowed with brutal strength. Finally, Tatyana Nikanorova's main antagonist, the Black Queen, looked like an annoying headmistress, while Ksenia Kovalevskaya and Ekaterina Fedotova gave the character more callousness and arrogance.
The performances take different forms. The total number of participants, including the choir and musicians, is about 200, and in addition to the bizarre characters, it is remembered for some crazy and lively plasticity, in which the choreographer Evgeny Balobanov participated. Responsible. The set designer Ekaterina Agniy naturally arranged the square-shaped stage and came up with a unique type of costume for each category of characters. Each of the chess pieces wore long black or white dresses, mirror flowers and insects had green and red patterns, and the lone heroes had their own style. The illusion of magical movement was supported by video projections by Ilya Shusharov and lighting effects by Irina Vtornikova. This is Alice's transition from a private white house, where the heroine hid with her black cat, to the kingdom of the chess queen (mirror). above the super-curtain growing to gigantic proportions), immersion in the colorful world of giant insects, a conversation with Humpty Dumpty, a return from a dream to reality, where the girl’s relatives, rejected by her, were initially waiting for her with gifts (The performance “Began with a family celebration in honor of the heroine’s birthday”).
Stylistically, the dynamic work of Elizaveta Korneeva is very diverse, but the score itself is distinguished by a conscious stylistic diversity. One of the leitmotifs of the entire work is the above-mentioned absurd phrase ("It flickered. Here the wolves howled around the flowers. The grapes trembled in the puddles, and the singer began to go crazy"), which gives the song liveliness. is sung in the song. The second important musical complex is the scales derived from the designations of the chessboard squares (a, b, c, d, e, g, g, z), which are also repeated in the opera several times. Finally, the score skillfully contains quotations from different eras, from Gesualdo to Beethoven and Wagner. The chromatic cannon was diligently sung by the twins Tilibom and Tararam, and the White Knight sang a sad song to the tune of "Groundhog". The heroine sat on a cup and flew into the sky at the end of the first act to the sounds of "The Journey of the Valkyrie."