Perm Opera / Mazeppa

By Martin Bernheimer

There is the potentially mighty Bolshoi in Moscow. There's the Mariinsky, Valery Gergiev's sometimes happy hunting-ground in St Petersburg. And then there's the Tchaikovsky Theatre of Perm.

Perm? An industrial city located on the banks of the Kama at the foot of the Urals, it was known for a while as Molotov. More important, it has hosted opera and ballet for 135 years. Celebrating that milestone, the Russians brought Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa to New York on Wednesday. The undertaking obviously was ambitious (a grievous fault?). A rather small, patently partisan audience cheered it proudly.

Based on quasi-historical Pushkin and completed in 1884, Mazeppa fuses soaring melodies, introspective monologues, throbbing orchestral commentaries, intricate set pieces and grandiose choruses. The opera was virtually unknown here until Gergiev dragged a musty Mariinsky version to Lincoln Center in 1998. The Met countered with a flashy production of its own, under Gergiev, of course, in 2006.

The Perm edition, borderline provincial, sounded fairly strong. Valery Platonov enforced considerable passion and reasonable precision in the pit, with additional brass stationed in a side loge. The ever-important chorus moved lethargically yet sang lustily. The uneven principals struck their prescribed poses with beguiling urgency. Unfortunately, the staging - a pretend-modern mishmash by George Isaakyan, the resident artistic-director - vacillated between ineptitude and naivety. Stanislav Fyesko dressed the cast in contemporary mufti and cluttered the badly lit unit-set with clumsy symbols: steps draped with sheets, watery projections, huge nails suggesting torture, a claw clutching a globe to convey oppression. The decor looked as if it cost seven kopeks.

Victor Chernomortsev, a celebrated veteran from the Mariinsky, managed to dominate the proceedings as the aging hetman Mazeppa, his rotund baritone awkwardly matched by a Falstaffian physique. Irina Krikunova, whose exquisite soprano tended to turn a bit shrill under pressure, revelled in the wide-eyed pathos of Maria, the young woman who loves him. Aleksandr Pogudin, though comparatively immature, thundered imposingly as Kochubei, her desperate father (ah, those plangent Russian basses). The others, less well equipped, did what they could.

The Financial Times, January 18 2008