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Although this year’s Golden Mask Festival operatic program ended last week with what seemed particularly well-considered and well-deserved awards, it failed to generate much excitement among Moscow operagoers.
Four of the 11 nominated productions were simply not brought to Moscow, because of a scarcity of performance venues and other technical reasons. But the presence of those four might not have helped matters much, considering that the Golden Mask musical jury found only one — the Mariinsky Theater’s “Gogoliada,” a triple bill of brand-new operas by three different composers based on tales of Nikolai Gogol — worthy of any award at all, handing the prize for best male singer in opera to Andrei Popov for his performances in two of the three works and a special jury prize to the production.
Of the remaining seven, three from Moscow opera companies already had played here repeatedly, while none of the rest, with one exception, drew a particularly favorable response from the jury, which failed to award them a single prize.
That one exception was the world-premiere staging of Alexander Tchaikovsky’s musical setting of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s well-known novel “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by the Perm Theater of Opera and Ballet. Tchaikovsky gave the grim tale an appropriately grim-sounding score, though one rather short on originality. Georgy Isaakyan, last year’s winner of the Golden Mask award for best director in opera, filled the stage with astonishingly realistic scenes of gulag life, and the large cast sang and acted to a very high standard. The jury rewarded the production with a prize to Valery Plantonov, for best work as a conductor in opera.
Considering the 16 nominations they received it, seemed almost certain that the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater’s highly regarded productions of Vladimir Kobekin’s “Hamlet (Danish) (Russian) Comedy” and Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” would be among this year’s major prize winners. And so they did, taking three of the five awards specifically tied to opera and two others relating to musical theater in general.
From the result, it appeared that the two Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko nominees must have run neck and neck for the award of best production of opera. And as in similar situations in the past, the Golden Mask jury divided up the spoils by giving the eventual runner-up, Kobekin’s modern-day take on “Hamlet,” recognition of practically equal prestige in the form of the award for best director in opera.
Besides naming Adolf Shapiro’s elegantly fashioned “Lucia” as best production of opera and Alexander Titel as best director for his wonderfully bizarre staging of Kobekin’s opera, the jury singled out soprano Khibla Gerzmava, probably the most accomplished singing actress on the Moscow stage, as best female singer in opera for her thrilling performance of the title role in “Lucia.” Yelena Stepanova was named best costume designer in musical theater for her “Lucia” costumes, and Kobekin was given best composer.
The third Moscow operatic nominee, Novaya Opera’s uproarious production of Giacomo Puccini’s one-act “Gianni Schicchi” also received much-deserved recognition by way of a special jury prize.
In ballet, Moscow had an opportunity to see all eight of the nominated productions. Standing head and shoulders above the rest were the two local nominees, “Russian Seasons” from the Bolshoi Theater and “Na Floresta” from the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Both ballets are the work of choreographers at the very pinnacle of their profession, former Bolshoi ballet artistic director Alexei Ratmansky (“Russian Seasons”) and Spaniard Nacho Duato (“Na Floresta”). Both are ballets of extraordinary beauty and profundity, the former exploring a range of traditional Russian folkways to a folk-music-based score by Leonid Desyatnikov, the latter a hymn in praise of the natural beauties of the Amazon rain forest set to music of Brazilian origin.
“Russian Seasons” ended up taking the award for best production, in what must have been an unusually difficult choice for the jury.
Neither “Na Floresta” nor “Russian Seasons” received in its wake a nomination for best choreographer because of a Golden Mask rule that denies such a nomination for a ballet originally created outside of Russia. “Na Floresta” had made its debut with the Netherlands Dance Theater two decades ago, and “Russian Seasons” had premiered with the New York City Ballet in 2006.
As it turned out, however, Ratmansky did carry off the best choreographer award, a result of his highly entertaining version of Rodion Shchedrin’s “The Little Humpbacked Horse” choreographed for the Mariinsky, a ballet that also brought the best female dancer award to the Mariinsky’s Alina Somova. Somova danced her role with considerable charm and skill. But the Bolshoi’s Natalya Osipova seemed more deserving of the prize, for her mastery of the much greater choreographic challenges of “Russian Seasons.”