Gergiev says it with
livestock
Financial
Times; Feb 20, 2002
By MARTIN BERNHEIMER
Voina y Mir, also known as War and Peace, has made it to the Metropolitan Opera at last. Tolstoy sings again.
Prokofiev's sprawling, patently uneven yet chronically fascinating epic was supposed to arrive at America's leading opera house shortly after its completion in the mid 1940s. But political crises intervened. The first US performance, drastically cut, took place in 1957 on television (those were the days). The first staged production was mustered by Sarah Caldwell, a quirky operatic visionary, 17 years later in Boston. The San Francisco Opera followed suit, extravagantly, in 1991. Given the cultural tunnel vision that afflicts New York, however, no one paid much attention to these pioneering efforts. Nothing really happens, after all, until it happens here.
It happened here with a vengeance last Thursday. The Met released some breathless statistics about the costly milestone. The production, realised in collaboration with the Mariinsky Theater of St Petersburg, was financed by - who else? - Alberto Vilar. The cast of zillions includes dancers, extras and livestock as well as singers. There are 1,000 costumes. The performance lasts nearly four and a half hours.
The score, a hyper-ambitious patchwork, embraces a lot of almost-sentimental gush for Peace and a lot of more-than-swollen bombast for War. In between, there's a lot of filler, some of it moody and clever, some of it just busy. Luckily, the Met, like San Francisco a dozen years earlier, boasts Valery Gergiev in the pit. His manners may be a bit eccentric and his concern for precision a bit lax. Never mind. No one can doubt his dedication, his zeal and his mastery of the idiom. He knows where the climaxes are, knows how to sustain the lyrical pathos, knows how to hold things together against the odds.
Presumably, he also knows how to cast the 68 roles in this edition. Anna Netrebko, making her company debut, is virtually ideal as Natasha Rostova, exquisite in voice, in looks, in poise and expressive impetuosity. Dmitri Hvorostovsky exudes princely ardour, shaded by a trace of narcissism, as Andrei. Gegam Grigo rian manages to convey the awkward pathos of Pierre Bezukhov with sympathetic power. Elena Obraztsova oozes crusty character as Madame Akhrosimova. Vassily Gerello rides Napoleon's vocal line, and his horse too, with aplomb. Oddly, no Russian basso is enlisted for the grandiose platitudes of Marshall Kutuzov; Samuel Ramey fills the breach plangently if not always steadily.
Andrei Konchalovsky, a refugee from the not-so-silver screen, directs the proceedings with an eye for effective stage pictures, and functions as an efficient traffic cop. Under the circumstances, that represents a considerable achievement. Unfortunately, he couldn't seem to decide if the challenge at hand was an old-fashioned showbiz spectacular or an exercise in stylised minimalism.
His problems were exacerbated by George Tsypin's picturesque quasi-unit set, essentially a drastically raked, revolving mound. The rake caused a problem at the first performance when one of Napoleon's itinerant soldiers apparently fell on to a safety net at the edge of the pit. The mishap occasioned a lot of gnashing about onstage dangers by the critic of the New York Times. On Monday, in an official letter distributed to the company before the second performance, the Met general manager complained of "some misinformed media reports". He claimed that "the super who walked downstage and jumped into the orchestra pit blames no one but himself because he was overacting and lost sight of where he was going." So much for verisimilitude and, just possibly, a threat of litigation in the wonderful world of opera. All's fair, it would seem, in peace and war.
(c) Financial Times, 2002