The Other Bolshoi

By William Bender

The Bolshoi Ballet is well into its fourth U.S. tour in 16 years. The Moiseyev folk dancers are regular visitors to America. Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich are now residents in the West. What more could Russia possibly offer American audiences? The Bolshoi Opera, for one. Though in recent years the Bolshoi has visited Osaka, Tokyo, Montreal, Paris and Milan, it was not until last week at New York's Metropolitan Opera that the company set foot, props and double bass pins on U.S. soil. Bolshoi means big, and the opera company is nothing if not bolshoi.

For its American premiere, 80 mammoth crates, each the size of a truck, were shipped across the Atlantic. They contained 400 wigs, 70 white gowns for the ball in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, a 14-ft.-wide chandelier for Prokofiev's War and Peace, plus more than 350 tons of other props, costumes, turntables, snare drums (eight for War and Peace's battle scenes alone) and vodka for everybody.

By air came the 460 members of the company--a chorus of 125, an orchestra of 110, 60 solo artists, five conductors, as well as assorted managers, technicians, librarians, wardrobe mistresses and a throat doctor.

Shouts and Applause. When the opening night curtain went up on Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, it all seemed worth the effort. Boris is the pinnacle of Russian opera, and those who filled the Met last week seemed to have no doubt that the Bolshoi's interpretation was something of a peak, too. The audience let loose repeated barrages of bravos, shouts and applause. Even Andy Warhol was seen to touch palm to palm. The Bolshoi stars were surprised and somewhat unnerved. "They didn't know who to send out first for curtain calls," said Gilbert Hemsley, a production supervisor for Hurok Concerts, which arranged the Bolshoi visit.

In light of the illuminating new Boris mounted by the Metropolitan last winter (TIME, Dec. 30) and based on Mussorgsky's original version, one can question the Bolshoi's steadfast adherence to the gaudy Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestration. The Met-Mussorgsky rendering makes Boris the protagonist in a true psychological drama; the Bol-shoi-Rimsky production, virtually unchanged for 28 years, makes him more the central figure in a historical pageant. His fellow 17th century Russians emerge, as it were, frieze-dried.

Yet one could not deny the tradition, authority and musical might that radiated from the stage. Yuri Simonov, 34, the Bolshoi's principal conductor, led a performance that had true epic range and that, in its bounce and snappy tempos, was refreshingly free of sanctification. Would that the Met had a chorus of such power and, rarity of rarities, group acting ability. The sets were eye-catching tableaux embodying a sturdy Russian medievalism overlaid with Byzantine splendor.

It was a performance that deserved its ceremonial place of honor, despite Yevgeni Nesterenko's too stolid portrayal of Boris. For the second night the Bolshoi chose its year-old production of Prokofiev's The Gambler (1914-15). In drawing his libretto from the Dostoevsky novelette, Prokofiev eliminated traditional arias, choruses, recitative and orchestral tone painting in favor of rata-tat-tat dialogue that clung too closely to Dostoevsky's original. It was an innovative gamble on Prokofiev's part, and he lost. The Bolshoi lost too by giving The Gambler a highly stylized format, somewhere between La Ronde and Last Year at Marienbad, complete with strobe lights and turntables on turntables.

Unexpected Influence. The Bolshoi is spending four weeks at the Met. From there the company will move to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In addition to Boris, Onegin, War and Peace and The Gambler, the coming weeks will also bring Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades and The Dawns Are Quiet Here, a World War II reminiscence composed by the Bolshoi's director general Kiril Molchanov.

In Moscow the Bolshoi Opera stages five performances a week throughout its ten-month season--either in the 119-year-old Petrovsky Street Theater (2,200 seats) or in the Kremlin Palace of Congress (6,000 seats). The influence of those surroundings can make itself felt in unexpected ways. In the last-act forest scene of Boris, a nobleman is captured and beaten by rebelling peasants. Mussorgsky named him Khrushchev. But in the program printed for the U.S. tour, the Bolshoi denies poor old Khrushchev a name, listing him simply as a boyar.

William Bender

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.