View: Next message | Previous message Next in topic | Previous in topic Next by same author | Previous by same author Previous page (March 1999, week 4) | Back to main OPERA-L page Join or leave OPERA-L Reply | Post a new message Search Options: Chronologically | Most recent first Proportional font | Non-proportional font ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 02:48:52 +0000 Reply-To: "H.E.Elsom" Sender: Discussion of opera and related issues From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Mazeppa, Bloomsbury Theatre, 27Mar98 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" More logophagia on Piotr Ilyich Mazeppa Peter Snipp Kochubei Andrew Slater Maria Rachel Nicholls Andrei Julian Jensen Liubov Miriam Murphy Cossack Alex Evans Iskra Robert Lown Orlik Maciek O'Shea Conductor David Drummond Director Netia Davan Wetton Lighting Rodney Grant University College London Opera Orchestra Chorus and Chamber Choir of UCL The list of productions by University College London Opera contains a remarkable number of British and even world premieres, but, as with last year's Mignon, Mazeppa isn't so much a rarity as an oddity. An agonizingly well-made tragedy of personal love and political ambition, with breathtaking music (far greater than Mignon in every way), it was wildly successful on its first appearance. But it somehow doesn't fit into the repertoire today in spite of resonances with the violent suppression of separatist movements in Chechnya and Kosovo. (David Alden's ENO production, involving chainsaws, was scandalous at the time but now seems rather tragically prescient.) A part of the reason for its rarity might be that it looks on paper like a Russian-tinted grab-bag of Verdian outtakes: Maria rejects dashing young Andre for the old hero Mazeppa, her godfather, the new ruler of the Ukraine. Her father Kochubei, hearing that she has already slept with Mazeppa and chooses to go off with him whatever her father wants, seeks revenge by revealing to the Tsar Mazeppa's plan to free the Ukraine from Russian rule. The Tsar refuses to believe it, and hands Kochubei over to Mazeppa, who executes him. Maria doesn't realise her father is going to die until her mother comes to tell her, but by then it is too late. Mazeppa is defeated by the Tsar at the battle of Poltava, and shoots Andrei on the battlefield. Maria comes looking for him, completely mad, and when he departs to save his own life, she sings a lullaby to the dying Andrei as she herself dies. Also, it's deeply pessimistic. Mazeppa, potentially a liberating hero, is autocratic and treacherous to the Tsar who trusts him. His love for Maria has a touch of the Humbert Humberts, though he tells a good sentimental story about an old man's love. Kochubei rejects a plan to punish Mazeppa in the Cossack way, by fighting him, and takes his revenge by denunciation. And in his Florestan-like prison scene he holds out against torture to avoid revealing where his money is, for pragmatic reasons. Andrei and Maria are both doomed beautiful young people, completely at the mercy of the political heavies. Only Liubov has any moral autonomy, and she is essentially advocating a traditional code of family and honour which no longer works. But Tchaikovsky's music focusses on the story of Maria. The opera begins with a chorus of girls gathering flowers, and Maria's expression of her love for Mazeppa and rejection of Andrei, and ends with her expression of despair and her deluded lullaby for the dying Andrei, who seems to replace the child she can never have because she gave up a conventional marriage for Mazeppa. Like Tatyana in Onegin, she has music that begins by expressing youthful romantic love, already tinged with a sense of doom. But her end is much more bitter, a painfully simple lullaby that replaces childhood sleep with death. Her mother's lament after Maria has left with Mazeppa is also typically Russian, at once a conventional response by a parent to a daughter leaving the family on marriage and agonized mourning for the child's death to her birth family. Netia Davan Wetton's production, also like her Mignon last year, looks as if it is done on a shoestring. The sets are austere, the battle is done with projected images of the Crimean war, and costumes are courtesy of thrift shops, army surplus and Very Easy Vogue Indeed (plus the costume assistant's grandmother). But, using a simple equation of Mazeppa's authoritarianism with Stalin's, it all hangs together very elegantly. Maria's youth is emphasized by her initial appearance in school, or Soviet youth, sports gear, like the other girls, and then by a Lolita disco outfit. The direction is also very simple indeed, with the performers moving in strictly organized groups, and the main characters standing or sitting and delivering in appropriate positions. And they certainly deliver. Rachel Nicholls, apparently in her early-to-mid twenties, didn't look like a nymphette, and her excellent voice is mature. But she sang beautifully and nearly impeccably, passionate in her confusion in the first two acts, and heartrending in the final lullaby. Miriam Murphy was a plausible (if scary) mother for her, also with a superb, massive but beautiful voice. Peter Snipp seemed to show some strain in the fourth performance in six nights, but in the first act he produced some beautiful singing, and acted the sentimental autocrat splendidly throughout. Andrew Slater was solid, occasionally heroic, as Kochubei, who has what sounds like a demandingly high tessitura in his prison scene. Julian Jensen was a vocally lovely, rather Italianate, Andrei, particularly moving in aria at the start of the final scene, where he resigns himself to his fate. This production didn't have the consummate professional theatricality, or the cracking Cossack dancing, of the Guildhall Cherevichki. The orchestra seemed to be hanging on for dear life at times, but they had enough energy and concentration to make it seem exciting rather than flaky. And the chorus, like the soloists, sang their often delightful and moving music straighforwardly and effectively. But Mazeppa is definitely an opera that works, and this production worked with it. Regards, Helen - H.E. Elsom he@helsom.demon.co.uk http://www.helsom.demon.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to: Top of message | Previous page | Main OPERA-L page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to the LISTSERV home page at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU.