Word: onegin
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...Opera paid its first visit to the U.S. in 1975, it amply lived up to its name, which is Russian for big. The company offered majestic productions of such epics as Prokofiev's War and Peace and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, plus that Russian national favorite, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. That was the monolithic age of Brezhnev, after all, and the Bolshoi had long been the Kremlin's chief cultural weapon; the party bureaucracy decreed the choices of repertory, casting, even stage sets. The results were as strong as a tank, and just as subtle. Still, American audiences were impressed...
Last week the Bolshoi began a return visit to the U.S., and its opening production showed the effects of its struggle to adapt to changing times. At Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, the company presented a brand-new version of its trademark work, Eugene Onegin. Only in the ballroom scene of the last act did the Bolshoi offer a whiff of its old grandiosity. Otherwise, the staging -- apparently designed to focus more attention on the main characters -- relied on one all-too-all-purpose country-house set for the first four scenes and on one skeletal tree for the fifth...
...casting of Onegin was designed to show off the Bolshoi's new crop of young singers. What is different about them? "Everything," says company spokesperson Svetlana Zavgorodnaya, with characteristically Russian fervor. "New emotions, new aesthetics, a new understanding of life!" Be that as it may, the young singers carry on the company's tradition of close ensemble performance. Vladimir Redkin as Onegin was an appropriately dashing cad. And in Nina Rautio, the Bolshoi presented a Tatiana who could be touchingly lyrical and also break a glass in the uppermost gallery. She carried her scenes triumphantly...
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...
...course, no translator of the classics has a guarantee of exclusivity: in the 20 years since Walter Arndt won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for his masterly version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, three publishers have brought out new translations of the same poem. Rabassa, who expects that his version of One Hundred Years of Solitude will ultimately be supplanted, believes the development is inevitable: "If you read Cervantes in Spanish today, he sounds relatively modern, but the translations of Don Quixote made by Cervantes' contemporaries seem terribly archaic." This variety of renditions has some advantages; each new translation...