Tughan Sokhiev conducts Shostakovich tonight LIVE

Tonight at 7pm European time LIVE on medici.tv, Tughan Sokhiev conducts the Orchestre National du Capitole, Toulouse in a special  programme in honour of Dimitri Shostakovich. This concert will be significant because Sokhiev has recemtly taken over as Music Director of the Bolshoi Opera. Sokhiev came up through the Russian system, though he's spent most of his career abroad, so perhaps this Shostakovich concert i8s a statement of intent. Please read my article about the background to his appointment here. 

"Edgar Moreau, one of the most sought-after young cellists on the classical scene, performs Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107. Dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovitch who premiered the work in Moscow in 1959, this concerto bears witness of the personal difficulties experienced by the composer at the time of composition. Shostakovich's anxiety due to his illness, as well as his resentment againt the regime, pierce throughout the concerto's four movements. In the finale especially, the sarcastic quotation of one of Staline's most favorite Russian melodies is to be read as a lugubrious remembrance of what Stalinism inflicted on the population of the Soviet Union". 

"In the second half of the concert, Tugan Sokhiev, music director of the Orchestre National du Capitole, conducts Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65. The subtitle "Stalingrad" is not in the orignal score. The Soviet government added this mention in order to portray Shostakovich's symphony as a memorial to those killed in the recent Battle of Stalingrad. The Symphony No. 8 was indeed considered by the composer's friend Isaak Glikman as "the most tragic work" ever composed by Shostakovich. Yet, this symphony lies within the tradition of symphonies composed in C minor (Beethoven's Fifth, Bruckner's Eighth, Mahler's Second, ...) which follow a teleological path from minor to major, from "tragedy to triumph". Though here triumph might well sound bittersweet."

More conductor chess - Turgan Sokhiev to the Bolshoi

Amother surprise in the latest round of Conductor Chess !

The Bolshoi Opera's general director­ Vladimir Urin  announced the appointment of Turgan Sokhiev, aged 36,  as Music Director effective next week - 1st February. The sudden change was preciptated by the resignation in December of Vassily Siniasky, two weeks before the premiere of a new Verdi Don Carlo. Urin described Sokhiev as "one of the most in-demand young conductors­ in the West."

 Sokhiev has not conducted the Bolshoi before, though he was for about a year Music Director at the Welsh National Opera. He conducts the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse (ONCT) and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO Berlin) and guests elsewhere, including with the Philharmonia in London.

Sokhiev's appointment comes at a critical point for the Bolshoi. Upheavals in the Bolshoi Ballet notwithstranding, the Bolshoi Opera, according to the Moscow Times , "since the resignation of Alexander Lazarev 19 years ago, the Bolshoi has lacked the strong musical leadership it enjoyed under an unbroken succession of notable conductors from near the beginning of the 20th century, among them, in addition to Lazarev, such outstanding figures in the musical life of Russia as Samuil Samosud, Nikolai Golovanov, Alexander Melik-Pashaev, Yevgeny Svetlanov and Gennady Rozhdestvensky" .

Of all Russian-born opera conductors,  bar Gergiev and Bychkov, Vladimir Jurowski has the widest repertoire,  and the highest profile. He would have been ideal for the Bolshoi, but he's a relative outsider in St Petersburg. He studied in Moscow, moving west aged 18.  He's possibly too "international". Sokhiev, on the other hand trained with the St Petersburg elite, under the famous Ilya Musin, ( d 1999) whose students included Rudolf Barshai,  Semyon Bychkov, Caetany, Siniasky, Temirakov,  Yakov Kreisberg and Valery Gergiev. Perhaps it is significant that Sokhiev, like Gergiev, hails from Ossetia.

According to the Moscow Times "Unlike his predecessor, Anatoly Iksanov, Urin seems determined to take a hands-on approach when it comes to shaping the future of opera and ballet at the Bolshoi......"For me, it was important in principle," said Urin, "that the new conductor be from Russia … a person who could speak with people in the theater in a common language. It was also important to know what this person believed in and how he viewed contemporary musical theater"

Shostakovich Bolt Ballet online

At last online, Dimitri Shostakovich's "lost" ballet Bolt , the famous Bolshoi production choreographed  by Alexei Ratmansky. The premiere in 1931 was greeted with vociferous opposition, and the ballet remained unknown until a complete edition was prepared for Gennady Rozhdestvensky to conduct in 1995. 

Bolt, Shostakovich's op 27a, is scored in eight movements, allowing the ballet to develop over a series of vignettes. Ostensibly, the ballet praises the discipline of a totalitarian state. Like soldiers, workers and athletes operate in well drilled formation like parts of a machine. Ratmansky adapts this to his choreography. The dancers move in tight units, their limbs jerking rhythmically like robots. In the second scene, the workers are exercising in a yard before starting work. A bureaucrat shouts "one, two, three, four" and their bodies obey. Viewed from above, the camera shows what the Bureaucrat sees - a neat, obedient ensemble. Close up (from the workers' level) we notice that one dancer gradually falls out of step. The music is lyrical, but in a mindlessly simplistic way, like folk song adapted as propaganda.  Sour trombones announce something more mysterious.  Swan Lake satirized?  The Rebel and shy girlfriend enact a tentative courtship, interrupted  by strident, violent brass and a formation of workers in red uniforms who obediently writhe in mechanical gestures as the men in white suits (the bureaucrats) beam with joy. Then, dancers in white uniforms. Have the inmates absorbed the values of the system? On cue, they shout slogans. Notice the stylized propaganda gestures - arms thrust upwards, earnest expressions.

The "hero" Koelkov relaxes with friends in a bar. Lovely opportunities for solo dancers to show their individual "personalities". The music seduces - jazz-like riffs, languid woodwinds. Femme fatale with gypsy roses in her hair looks on as Girlfriend in white enters, aghast. A bar room fight, and a thief.  Do, lowlifes believe "Property is Theft"?  A bolt is quietly produced. Then a magical interlude where the stage is dark, and lights shine like stars. The Bolt is thrown into the machine  Red smoke pours out as the dancers jerk and leap. The lights turn out to be searchlights, as in a prison yard, and the walls move into action. Night descends again, and out of the darkness, athletes appear dancing in bright costumes. Then, wonderful contraptions that look like battleships, complete with fake waves. Inside, a dancer, his or her movements constrained by the complex fusellage they have to carry. Everything in order, right.  Girlfriend dances to maniacally cheerful music., but her movements are violent. Madder still, a xylophone solo with rude trombone raspberries. When the Apotheosis comes, the stage is bathed in golden light. Trumpets announce the New Machine. The Red workers return, even more dehumanized in plastic suits with gas masks, dance a grotesque formation and head off on scooters. Are we in hell, and are the red workers demons? Whatever the first production might have looked like, that first audience must have realized how subversive the ballet really is, despite the "triumphant" finale., straight out of a totalitarian  state celebration. Perhaps the premiere audience got the irony and were disturbed.

Also watch the documentary here Bolt, avant garde kitsch which puts the ballet into context, connecting it to radical film and theatre of the period. Bolt was Ratmansky's first big success before he emigrated to the US. Will Bolt be done again at the Bolshoi  Will Ratmansky work again at this level, and in Russia?  Who knows? Perhaps it's the nature of good art to unsettle rather than to soothe. In 2006, the Marrinsky came to the Coliseum in London with four ambitious programmes - The Nose, conducted by Gergiev, a different version of Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, and a trimmed down version of Shostakovich's The Golden Age which deals with a similar theme of athletes in a Soviet system. Gergiev didn't conduct and the piece sounded a mess, nothing like the outstandingly vivid recording of the complete ballet, conducted by José Serebrier.  Get it HERE. I'll write about that later when I have more time, because it's a good companion to  Bolt. The Golden Age is better as music, but Bolt is tighter in dramatic terms.

Inside a Fabergé Egg - Bolshoi Ruslan and Lyudmila

What must it feel like to be inside a Fabergé egg ? The new Bolshoi Theatre is sumptuous. It's splendid outside, and stunning within. That kind of extravagance is a visionary act of faith in the value of art. For £430 million Moscow has a jewel which enhances the nation's reputation. For £800 million in 2002, London got the Millenium Dome, which continued to bleed money until it became an arena for pop concerts. 

Fabergé egg indeed, as the curtain rose on the first full opera, Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila "as iconic in Russia as Carmen is in France" as the host says on Arte TV (watch full video HERE).   Make time to listen carefully, luxuriate in the exquisite performance. Vladimir Jurowski conducts. The Bolshoi is in a completely different stratosphere from Glyndebourne and the LPO, with all respect. If they snare him, on the basis of this we're all in for wonderful things.

Ruslan and Lyudmila isn't really medieval Kiev. Indeed, the story bears a striking resemblance to Tasso's Orlando saga which gave rise to works like Armida, Rinaldo, Orlando Furioso, Orlando Paladino and much else. Thwarted lovers, sorcerers and sorceresses good and bad, enchanted palaces, magic gardens. Ruslan and Lyudmila fascinates because it's fairy tale fantasy. So we gasp at the sheer beauty of the wedding feast and suspend belief in plot logic.

Ruslan (Mikhail Petrenko) and Lyudmila (Albina Shagimuratova) seem blissfully happy. But wait! Like any decent fairy-tale, something's not right. Bayan the mystic (Charles Workman who also sings Finn the white witch) warns of danger. Then you notice wedding guests with big head masks. Then, while the guests are dancing, half hidden in the melée, there's a giant head. Friends or foes? Lyudmila gets whisked away in a carpet, as in the original.   

More controversially, director Dmitri Tcherniakov and his team show the characters in the following acts in normal "modern" clothes. This isn't wrong, since fairy tales deal with human situations (albeit extreme). Indeed, we can concentrate better  on the singing and acting. When Ruslan confronts the Giant Head, it's a human face projected on a backcloth - much more moving than a comedy structure. Given the horizontals that large crowd scenes dictate, film projections are a good way of using this vast stage. But Ruslan's confrontation with the Head is extraordinarily dramatic - one of the best moments inn the whole production,

Rather less effective though are the portrayals of Finn and Naina the Armida-like sorceress, neither demonic nor sympathetic. The scene in Naina's castle is a mess. Can these aimlesss sirens seduce anyone? Their captives look bored out of their heads. On the other hand, had Tcherniakov shown them more forcefully, either as hooker vamps, or sweet nubile babes, it would have upset many in the audience. Compromise isn't a good choice.

Infinitely better are the scenes in Lyudmila's dream-state. Lit in luminous whites and blues, the set seems to float in space, like Lyudmila, bewitched. The dance sequences suggest what might be happening in her mind. Again, the simplicity allows full focus on the singing - Yuri Minenko's Ratmir is divine! Tcherniakov may not please conservatives, but these last two acts are sensitive to the music, movement enphasizing what's in the orchestra. Indeed, throught the opera, solo instruments appear on stage as part of the action, showing how Glinka uses them to spotlight inner states. For example, harpsichord and harp in the banquet scenes. Lyudmila sings her long Act IV aria shadowed by a violinist, the music expressing, perhaps, what's in her psyche.There are things in this Ruslan and Lyudmila that irritate like crazy, but moments like this which make it worthwhile.
Please see also Opera Cake