Word: bolshoi
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Passion and Despair. War and Peace is finally catching on. In 1973 the work was chosen to open the new Sydney Opera House. A year ago in Boston, Sarah Caldwell presided over the first U.S. staging. Last week in New York, at long last, the Bolshoi Opera unveiled the production of War and Peace that it has been performing in Moscow since 1959. With chandeliers shining, cannons roaring, soldiers marching and Moscow burning, it was, as it should have been, spectacular. Coming along as the fifth of six productions offered by the Bolshoi during its current American debut...
...strength of the Bolshoi's first-night performance-from the blasting power of both chorus and orchestra to the sensitive, rich-voiced singing of Soprano Makvala Kasrashvili as Natasha and Baritone Yuri Mazurok as Andrei -lay in the company's willingness to take War and Peace for what it is and never what it is not. It is an epic; but unlike the heroes of Verdi or Wagner, Napoleon and Kutuzov never meet face to face, nor do we ever see Andrei suffer his fatal wound, nor can Natasha save him. But although War and Peace...
...Peace will be one of the major attractions next week when the Bolshoi moves on to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. So will Boris Godunov, which opened the Bolshoi's New York stand, as well as the two major Tchaikovsky operas that followed...
...light of the illuminating new Boris mounted by the Metropolitan last winter (TIME, Dec. 30) and based on Mussorgsky's original version, one can question the Bolshoi's steadfast adherence to the gaudy Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestration. The Met-Mussorgsky rendering makes Boris the protagonist in a true psychological drama; the Bol-shoi-Rimsky production, virtually unchanged for 28 years, makes him more the central figure in a historical pageant. His fellow 17th century Russians emerge, as it were, frieze-dried...
...could not deny the tradition, authority and musical might that radiated from the stage. Yuri Simonov, 34, the Bolshoi's principal conductor, led a performance that had true epic range and that, in its bounce and snappy tempos, was refreshingly free of sanctification. Would that the Met had a chorus of such power and, rarity of rarities, group acting ability. The sets were eye-catching tableaux embodying a sturdy Russian medievalism overlaid with Byzantine splendor...