National Theatre Award “The Golden Mask” 2012

Mariinsky theatre premiere in Moscow

DEAD SOULS
Rodion Schedrin

Conductor – Valery Gergiev
Director – Vassiliy Barkhatov
Designer – Zinoviy Margolin


Running time: 3 hours 10 minutes
The performance has two intervals

Celebrating 35 years since the world premiere of this Schedrin’s opera, the Golden Mask 2012 programme features a new production of this significant creation of Boris Pokrovsky and Yuri Temirkanov. At that time, the opera was at ones a culmination of Bolshoi’s infatuation with realism and the last masterpiece of the great epoch.

The return of the Schedrin’s grand creation to the stage of Mariinsky Theatre in St-Petersburg has also become an important historical moment. Valery Gergiev was waiting for it for several years: Gogol’s legendary poem, which provided a story plot for the opera, has had a complicated theatrical life. And, first of all, because drama theatre can hardly embody on the stage something, that lies in the realms of music. Schedrin has brought the theme of the road centre-stage, making it a symbol of Russia itself. We see satiric encounters of Chichikov, main hero of the poem, with Russian country gentlemen as if taken in close up. In this unique opera, Russian folk songs are naturally intertwined by Rossini-resembling cadenzas, and the music score as a whole continues traditions of Musorgsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. The opera has been staged by Vassiliy Barkhatov – a young opera director, one of the most remarkable and well-known in contemporary Russian opera-world, and  designer Zinoviy Margolin, long known in the country’s theatrical world.

Большой театр (Основная сцена)
Театральная площадь, д. 1, м. Охотный ряд, 125009 Москва
Russian Federation

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