Astrologer         Jean-Paul Fouchecourt
Tsar Dodon         Paata Burchuladze
Guidon             Ilya Levinsky
Afron              Garry Magee
General Polkan     Maxim Mikhailov
Cockerel           Gillian Webster
Amelfa             Alexandra Durseneva
Queen of Shemakha  Elena Kesselidi

Conductor          Vladimir Jurowski
Director           Tim Hopkins

Royal Opera House Chorus
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Rimsky-Korsokav's Golden Cockerel is based on a story by Pushkin which is
itself plagiarized from an orientalizing fairy tale by Washington Irving.
The original is a cod folk tale which starts off as a mixture of King Lear
and Oblomov -- an old king wants to stop fighting and sleep -- then drifts
through bloodshed and an erotic encounter with a mysterious queen to a
sudden ending when the old king brings the queen home to marry her. He
drops down dead. The golden cockerel is a gift from a mysterious astrologer
which warns when the kingdom is in danger. The astrologer demands the queen
from the old king as his reward, and it is the cockerel that kills the king
when he refuses. Rimsky adds a frame in which the astrologer says that he
and the queen are the only real characters. In other words, the whole thing
is a kind of dream, which justifies some absurd humour and also provides a
cover for some obvious satire about a useless Tsar and idiotic generals.

This production by Tim Hopkins takes its cue from the dream idea in several
ways. The set in the first act is a grey room with a huge bed, the king's.
In the second act, it is the same room with rows of beds. There are surreal
incidents and nightmare episodes, especially in the second act when the
queen is seducing the old king. For example, the king and the army
variously find themselves in their long johns, and the king gets dressed up
in disco clothes  and does a silly dance. A related idea is the use of
projections (perhaps also an allusion to the way Rimsky's parodies of
Russian style resemble serious film music in Soviet era): we see the king's
dream in act one, which foreshadows his meeting with the queen, projected
on a screen behind his bed. At the start of act three, the people watch a
newreel with nothing on it, and have to get Amelfa the housekeeper to
provide the missing information. The costumes are black and white, except
for the astrologer who has a sixties maroon velvet suit and the queen, who
wears gold lame.

Alongside all this are a handfull of Russian icons, especially a Russian
doll which seems to embody the triple goddess thing -- the young queen, the
mature, nurturing housekeeper, and the cockerel, who is a babushka with
saggy stockings and smeared lipstick. The king wants the young woman, but
he is stuck with all three, I suppose one inside the other as it were. The
queen's strange foreign entourage is a parade of Soviet images, presumably
a nod to what did get the dozy Tsar ten years after the Golden cockerel was
written. The Soviet paraphernalia is left behind in the epilogue in which
the astrologer and queen, the "real" characters, find themselves locked
into the grey room together.

Musically, this performance was fascinating, strange and interesting with
lots of parody and fantastic shifts and conjunctions. As usual, the
orchestra gave a fine performance, under Vladimir Jurowski, who stepped in
for Gennadi Rozhdestvenky at the last minute.

Rozhdestvenky has flu, as does Elena Kesselidi, who nevertheless sang and
gave an exotic, mysterious performance as the queen, with a few rough
patches vocally early on. She looks superb in the role, a bit Gina
Bellmanish, certainly a lazy old lecher's fantasy woman. Jean-Paul
Fouchecourt was clearly audible as the astrologer -- the role, a eunuch in
the original, which adds to the puzzle of why he wants the queen, was
effectively written for an haut contre and the orchestration works around
him. But he didn't seem to be in the production, which had him as a naff
magician and the queen as his assistant.

There was a good set of exotic ex-Soviet singers. Paata Burchuladze was
particularly impressive. He was resonant, comic and pathetic as the old
Tsar, suffering only from the loss of his moustache at one point. The
non-Russian speaking cast fitted in very well.

Theatrically, it was strange and mildly disturbing, which seems right.
There were boos for the director and production team, but psychoanalysis
and communism were in the pipeline in 1908 (The interpretation of dreams
was published in 1905) and the idea was certainly worth a try.

Regards,