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| Venera Gimadieva (Shemakha), Tim Mix (Dodon) in The Golden Cockerel. Photo: Ken Howard |
OPERA REVIEW
Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico
RODNEY PUNT
The Santa Fe Opera’s
commendable practice of exhuming rarely performed operas brought to
the Crosby Stage this summer the last of Rimsky-Korsakov’s fourteen works in the genre, The Golden Cockerel (better known in French
as Le Coq d’Or). It gave the Russian
composer his very first, if belated, outing here.
If one is familiar only with the
composer’s Scheherazade and Capriccio Espagnol, the more sophisticated
treatment of their exotic colors and rhythms in this greater musical cousin
will come as a revelation. Rimsky’s proto-Impressionistic score was to
influence and inspire his star pupil, Igor Stravinsky, in his Fireworks (1908) and Firebird (1910), particularly in the use
of primitive ritualistic motifs.
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| A Czar unfit for service. Photo: Paul Horpedahl |
A cautionary tale, The Golden Cockerel has a foolish king
on the exotic eastern fringes of the Russian Empire engaging in antics that
lead to disaster. It was the product of the aging composer’s concerns over the rapid disintegration of Russia's political climate and social cohesion at the dawn of the twentieth century. Czar
Nicholas II’s loss of naval forces in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War vexed the composer, who had been a naval officer and revered the institution.
Alexander Pushkin’s eponymous
last poem (based on a couple of Washington Irving stories) had satirized the
earlier Czar Nicholas I in 1834. Librettist Vladimir Belsky adapted the Pushkin
for the stage and Rimsky completed its music in 1907, influenced and deepened by
a late-in-life study of Richard Wagner’s mature operas. But the Czarist censor delayed the opera’s premiere until 1909, by which time the exhausted
composer had already died. Eight years later, exactly a century ago, the Russian Revolution would eliminate
Imperial Russia and its czars forever.
The story is framed by a prologue
and epilogue, with an Astrologer setting the context. It opens with a worried Czar
Dodon mounting his throne. He lacks trust in his general, and his two doltish
sons can’t agree on a course of action against enemies on the realm’s borders. An Astrologer offers Dodon the advice of his aviary savant, a Golden Cockerel. Dodon accepts the
offer but refuses any contract for terms, stating he pays only on whim. When
Dodon later dreams of a threatening Queen of Shemakha, the Cockerel verifies
the danger and sets Dodon off to war.
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| The Czar's bride-to-be. Photo: Ken Howard |
In a mountain gorge, Dodon finds
the bodies of his two sons, who may have stabbed one another. The Queen of
Shemakha enters. Her impromptu seduction of Dodon erases his intention to war on
her, inducing instead his desire to marry her. General Polkan’s warning about
this leads to his beheading. When all are returned to the Capital, the Astrologer claims as just
compensation the Queen of Shemakha for his own pleasure. Enraged, Dodon strikes
the Astrologer down, plunging the realm into immediate darkness as the revengeful Cockerel pecks Dodon to
death. When light returns, the Cockerel and the Queen are gone. In an epilogue, the Astrologer, alone with the Queen of Shemakha, claims all the preceding
to have been “merely an illusion.”
Such a fantastic fable can be
played many ways. Its inherently disjointed narrative and artificial characters benefit from a staging
that can thread the needle between farce and tragedy. While this production was
colorful and its music impressive, its frivolous if diverting staging shed little light on any of the darker undercurrents that may have prompted the work’s creation
110 years ago.
The distracted czar's Falstaff-like comeuppance relies heavily on jokes and sight-gags in Paul Curran’s mad-cap,
high-camp direction. It is sprinkled with winks and nods to the audience about the current occupant of the White House and his own two sons. Sung and acted with infectious gusto, including stellar work from Susanne Sheston's choral forces, and the glinting sheen and color of conductor Emmanuel Villaume’s orchestra, the belly laughs make for an amusing evening, even as, on occasion, they overwhelm quieter moments in the music’s shifting textures that want to dwell in more serious regions. (Much of Act II had been composed a decade earlier for other operatic projects, hence the work's occasional mood swings.)
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| Flattering the Czar. Photo: Paul Horpedahl |
Paul Hackenmueller’s subtle lighting brought out the radiance in Gary McCann’s fanciful Russian costumes. His set's Russian-egg curves surrounded the characters, reinforcing the folk-like feel. A carpet screen covered the stage and angled diagonally back and
up to the left as a sheet for Driscoll Otto's colorful projections: at turns an oriental carpet, an outdoor forest, a King’s court and, projected on
its uplifted end, the warnings of the Cockerel to the Czar (sung off-stage).
The Cockerel image worked best for those seated in the center and right side of the
house; it went unregistered as a visual image for those on the left.
Accolades for the evening’s most impressive performance went to stellar soprano Venera Gimadieva as the Queen of Shemakha, who
sang with bright luster her “Hymn to the Sun,” a beguiling paean to
Nature. Her entrance in the second act had been preceded by what appeared to be side-by-side gliding swans, late of a Tchaikovsky ballet, their fluffy overhead feathers worthy of a Las Vegas act. (In the context of the farce, this seemed a self-consciously spoofy throwback to some of the Santa Fe Opera's campy productions of yesteryear.)
Shemakha's later seduction scene was worthy of a grown-up Salome, who would seem to have picked up a successful trick or two on the art of striptease. (The infamous Strauss opera had premiered just four years before Rimsky's.) A clumsy staging decision, however, had Shemakha traipsing around half naked for the remainder of the second act, losing some of her (genuinely earned) titillation mojo with overexposure. Credit, nonetheless, genuine star Gimadieva's stoic trooping.
Shemakha's later seduction scene was worthy of a grown-up Salome, who would seem to have picked up a successful trick or two on the art of striptease. (The infamous Strauss opera had premiered just four years before Rimsky's.) A clumsy staging decision, however, had Shemakha traipsing around half naked for the remainder of the second act, losing some of her (genuinely earned) titillation mojo with overexposure. Credit, nonetheless, genuine star Gimadieva's stoic trooping.
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| A throne too big for a king: Photo: Paul Horpedahl |
Baritone Tim Mix’s Czar Dodon, in fire-engine red tights stuffed with the contents of several pillows, mounted a huge, gold-gilted throne far larger than his feeble powers could command. Eric Owens had initially been announced for the role; while Mix does not possess quite the latter’s
massive voice for a full dose of Russian gravitas, he portrayed energetically its tottering fool. His round of hand-shaking suggested the insincere bravura of a certain current president.
High altitude character-tenor
Barry Banks, as the Astrologer, emoted all the charm of a spidery con-artist as he set about his web-spinning business with the feeble Czar. Soprano Kasia Borowiec was the chirpy voice of the Golden Cockerel,
but one missed what a live characterization by her could have brought to the role had it not been just a flickering screen image for only some to see.
Tenor Richard Smagur as
Prince Guidon and baritone Jorge Espino as Prince Afron made the most of their
roles as silly Russian versions of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Solid and solemn bass
Kevin Burdette gave in his General Polkan one of the few sympathetically human roles in the
tale.
The crumbling of Imperial
Russia a century ago, filtered through the colorful farce of this evening, holds a cautionary tale for us closer to home.
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Photos used by permission of the Santa Fe Opera.
Performance reviewed: July 19, 2017
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