Word: bolshoi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This week at the Met, and in the tour's finale next week at the Wolf Trap festival outside Washington, the Bolshoi will offer two far less familiar works, which are nevertheless as characteristically Russian as the Onegin. One is Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada, a spectacular combination of opera and ballet, folk fantasy and fairy tale. Mlada is an oddity that played only fitfully after its premiere in 1892 and had disappeared for more than a half-century when the Bolshoi revived it in 1988. "Mlada was a hard test for us," says chief designer Valery Levental, "because nobody knew...
...Joan of Arc story, The Maid of Orleans, based on a play by Schiller. It presented a different problem: how to bring life to what is essentially a series of choruses and processions. One solution was to highlight Joan's fictitious romance with a Burgundian soldier. The Bolshoi's directors, says Kokonin, "read Tchaikovsky's music according to what they saw as Schiller's original theme: the conflict of love and duty...
However these works are received by American audiences, they will be shadowed by the twin demons that dog the Bolshoi back home, budget crises and hostile critics. "There is a fierce struggle going on at all levels of the Soviet government, and this struggle is mirrored in every cultural institution, and particularly in the Bolshoi, the jewel in the Soviet crown," says Harlow Robinson, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the State University of New York at Albany, a biographer of Prokofiev and a frequent visitor to the Bolshoi. "Because they previously were supported entirely by subsidy, they...
...Desperate" is also a term used by Mark Hildrew, a London music manager who has specialized in hiring away Soviet singers. "The Bolshoi standards have gone down in the past seven or eight years," says Hildrew. "Maybe I am one of the culprits for trying to find the best Soviet talent and taking these people away. That leaves gaps...
...Bolshoi's main problem, says Marina Nestyeva, an editor at the Moscow monthly Sovetskaya Muzyka, is that at a time when smaller, more venturesome troupes are springing up in the U.S.S.R., and even the rival Kirov Opera of Leningrad is showing new vitality, "they lack the gusto. They do too little, too slowly. Such immobility is simply impermissible these days." Critics take the dilapidated condition of the Bolshoi Theater (which also houses the equally straitened Bolshoi Ballet) as symbolic. Spots have darkened its walls; danger signs hang here and there; the sculpture of a chariot-borne Apollo on its roof...