THE STATIONMASTER (Smelkov) & Chiara Taigi Concert Peter and Paul Fortress 2024
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: THE STATIONMASTER, Chiara Taigi Concert
- Composer: Smelkov Alexander
- Libretto: Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, by Pushkin Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Peter and Paul Fortress in the Commandant's House Atrium, St. Petersburg, Russia
- Recorded: July 26, 2024
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Chiara Taigi
- Conductor:
- Orchestra:
- Stage Director: Maria Safariants
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Format: DVD
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: SIGMART FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Alexander Smelkov’s opera The Stationmaster was composed in 1998. Having undertaken the melodramatic plot, the composer was not drawn by the trickery of postmodernism that allows everything to be made ironic, to be pushed aside, to regard everything with thinly veiled snobbery. Simply speaking, he didn’t even write a warm-hearted parody of the genre. Quite the reverse, together with the librettist Albina Shulgina he increased the melodrama of the narrative. And he defined the genre of the work very precisely as an “opera-romance”. Already in Dunya’s first song “A dark blue cloud sprinkled water on the nettle by the porch, and the beautiful daughter shamed her honoured father…” one can hear intonations of a “cruel romance”. This is both the introduction to the opera and a brief retelling of Pushkin’s tale which is well-known to Russian readers.
In trying to enter the distant past, Smelkov does not rush to use stylisations. In order to get into the timescale it would be sufficient to put on a mask and put on a costume as was worn two centuries ago. But in order to get into the spirit of the age you don’t have to wear someone else’s dress, but rather, as they say, get under the skin of your characters and really look at them. And we hear this in the music of the opera – in Minsky’s frivolous romance “Love on the road”, the trio heralding disaster “The bell is already tolling…”, Simon Vyrin’s mournful lament “Ah, Dunya, Dunya! What a girl she was!”, the “Grand polonaise brillante” which opens the scenes in St Petersburg and the “Broken polonaise” which heralds the tragic finale.
Quoted from Mariinsky Theatre