1.Real tsar quality
The 1869 Boris Godunov is the original and best
Hugh Canning Published: 20 March 2016
Thirteen years after the Royal Opera last revived its “classic” Andrei Tarkovsky production, Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov returns to the repertoire in a stylish new production by Richard Jones, starring Bryn Terfel as the troubled Tsar and magnificently conducted by Antonio Pappano.
It’s one of the RO’s hottest tickets — a rare occurrence for this opera, in my experience — and for the first time in decades the company performs the original seven-scene version, without a break. In recent European productions, this has become the new normal for Boris productions, although it goes back to Pavel Lamm’s radical edition for a 1928 Leningrad production, when the version made for the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1908 was jettisoned for Musorgsky’s shorter, pithier 1869 score — austerely orchestrated and rejected by the great Russian theatres.
There may be some who hanker after the glitter and glamour of a Rimskyfied Boris, with its “Romantic” Polish act, but Musorgsky’s first thoughts strike me as more coherent and dramatically convincing. They certainly do in this staging, full as it is of Jones’s directorial tics: singers striding across the stage, a dumb show in which the real Tsarevich Dmitry (Ivan the Terrible’s son, whose disappearance haunts Russian history as much as the Princes in the Tower do ours) is repeatedly murdered by masked assassins.
Almost everything Jones does in Miriam Buether’s handsome set — a black box embossed with bells, with a vaulted second stage above — is stylised, yet Boris’s tragedy and that of the Russian people are movingly outlined. Renato Balsadonna’s reinforced chorus is the evening’s star turn, especially in the Coronation scene, where Nicky Gillibrand costumes them as if for a Diaghilev Ballets Russes spectacular.
Terfel takes a couple of scenes to get his bass-baritone into gear, and he wears his coronation robes awkwardly, but by the time he gets to his monologue “I have attained supreme power”, his voice relishes the words, and his psychological depiction of the guilt-racked monarch deepens, reaching its climax in his heartbreaking encounter with the Holy Fool (Andrew Tortise) outside St Basil’s Cathedral and, above all, in his final meeting with his son Fyodor (a beautifully observed cameo from the boy treble Ben Knight). His confrontations with the other principal players, John Graham-Hall’s easily dislikeable, Uriah Heep-like Shuisky and Ain Anger’s gravely sung Pimen — a Boris in the making — ooze a creepy sense of political machination. Boris’s mad appearance in the council chamber has rarely been more frightening.
It’s a good ensemble cast that achieves much more thanks to Pappano’s conducting. The RO’s music director hasn’t done much Russian opera, but on the evidence of this darkly unfolding panorama of that nation’s history, he should obviously do more.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/cul ... 678766.ece
vs
2."However, the opera was rejected (10 February 1871) by a vote of 6 to 1, ...
"'No,' they answered me, 'it's impossible. How can there be an opera without the feminine element?! Mussorgsky has great talent beyond doubt. Let him add one more scene. Then Boris will be produced!'"[18]
— Lyudmila Shestakova, in My Evenings, her recollections of Mussorgsky and The Mighty Handful, 1889
Other questionable accounts, such as Rimsky-Korsakov's, allege that there were additional reasons for rejection, such as the work's novelty:[19]
"...Mussorgsky submitted his completed Boris Godunov to the Board of Directors of the Imperial Theatres ... The freshness and originality of the music nonplussed the honorable members of the committee, who reproved the composer, among other things, for the absence of a reasonably important female role."[20]
— Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Chronicle of My Musical Life, 1909" Wiki
