Aleko. Now in song and dance

The new production by the Kyivans caused a craze among the public due to two reasons. Firstly, because Aleko is the season’s opening production of the famous company, and secondly, because it is the first time that Vitalii Malakhov, a renowned director and art producer for the Theater at Podol, debuts in opera.

It is the very personality of the latter that inspired much intrigue: How is a drama director going to cope with music directing and the Kyiv Opera’s persistent problems – the immobility of the choristers and the constraints of soloists on stage?

However, I must say that while the opening night did not bomb, it was not a triumph either.

The director Malakhov and the conductor Kozhukhar produced their own edition of Rakhmaninoff’s one-act play, shuffling some musical pieces. To keep the audience amused while the orchestra is playing, they introduced ballet interludes to illustrate the action.

The background shows scenes of the Gypsies’ nomadic life (choristers slowly strolling around the stage), while in the proscenium, dancers perform various pas (a Russian dance and mime scenes depicting the catching of butterflies, fishing, etc.). Above the stage was a huge canvas, a cloud, on which images of flowers, snow, and rain are projected. In the course of the performance the canvas is lowered onto the stage and turns into the Gypsies’ tents.

It should be mentioned that this solution by the scenic artist Maria Levytska is quite felicitous: on the one hand, it very aptly renders the Gypsies’ nomadic nature, and on the other, the tents become a maze in which Aleko (Taras Shtonda) sets out to look for Zemfira (Oksana Kramareva), his unfaithful wife, only to find her caressing the Young Gypsy (Dmytro Kuzmin).

The orchestra, conducted by Volodymyr Kozhukhar, dominated as usual. Maestro Kozhukhar would not adjust to the singers in his strategic concept. He fully rendered the rich timbre of the author’s dramatic music, sometimes even smothering the soloists (the tenor Kuzmin in particular) and the chorus.

Inarticulateness is one of the problems that struck the present company of singers. The opera is performed in the original language, Russian, which is why this time the house decided not to provide translation in a creeping line, a common practice for operas in foreign languages, to help the audience better follow the action on stage. In fact, they shouldn’t have done that. The audience listened hard, but they were not always able to make out the words. It was just a piece of luck that most of them were knowledgeable about literature and had read Pushkin’s Gypsies, on which the opera is based, with the libretto originally written by Volodymyr Nemyrovych-Danchenko, and edited by Malakhov.

The performance emphasized the principal conflict, a clash of characters between the free-loving Gypsies and the proud, selfish Aleko, who had fled from “the stifling bondage of the cities.” Aleko had been dreaming of finding peace of mind among the nomads, but eventually failed to grasp the unrestricted and freedom-loving Gypsy spirit.

The bass Serhii Mahera succeeded in creating a vivid image of the Old Gypsy. Zemfira’s song You Old and Terrible Husband, by Kramareva, together with the rousing backup dancing, is in itself a separate concert number. Unfortunately though, the duet representing a clash of two extremes – the free, proud Gypsy Zemfira, and the jealous Aleko – flopped.

Neither was the director able to stir up the choristers: they sung well, but a performance is not a concert, and the audience had expected not only to hear, but see the opera as well. Kuzmin and Kramareva were very unconvincing as lovers. Yet the brilliant performance of Aleko’s cavatina by the bass Shtonda alone makes the performance worth seeing. With his voice, he managed to render what he failed to act on stage: the romanticism of his hero tortured by jealousy as he remembered Zemfira’s past love.

After the performance, the director Malakhov confessed in his interview to The Day: “I was curious to try myself in opera (the idea came from Petro Chupryna, chief executive of the National Opera). I could only approach the ABC of producing an opera. This has become a positive experience for me in terms of learning something new.”