ARTS ROBERT THICKNESSE STRICTLY BOLSHOI
Closed for renovations since 2005, one of the world’s great lyric theatres has finally reopened its doors. Our opera critic reports from Moscow
T
wo weeks ago, with extreme pomp, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre finally reopened after a story wear- ingly familiar to anyone who’s had
the builders in: the job took a little longer and cost a teeny bit more than originally envisaged. This is Russia, so that amounted to a three- year overrun and several hundred million dollars. After six years and an official cost of US$689 million – by some accounts 16 times the original budget, and few believe the figure – plus countless accusations of bribery, embezzlement and corruption, one of the world’s great opera houses is back in business. Things have been far from quiet during the
closure. The opera and ballet continued to perform on a new, smaller stage, and the restoration itself was hardly uneventful. In 2008, the building was announced to be on the point of collapse: 75 per cent unstable, with 17 vertical cracks, and the wooden foun- dations had almost completely rotted. In 2009, President Medvedev finally took control of the terminally drifting process and people began to take seriously the idea of actually getting the work done whatever the cost. It amounted to an almost complete rebuild.
The whole fabric was crumbling. The foun- dations were removed piece by piece – by hand – and now the theatre stands on 7,000 new pilings. An immensely expensive stage, German-made, complete with lighting, audio and video equipment, was ordered at a reported cost of US$200 million. Shoddy Soviet-era materials were removed from the auditorium to restore the original acoustics, and the old panelling was painstakingly rebuilt; a factory was discovered which could replicate the Villeroy and Boch tiles of which only two remained, and another found a swatch of material matching the original upholstery and ran off 800 yards over three years. A couple of weeks before the opening, I had a tour of the theatre, blazing like the sun with its chandeliers sparkling; all the gold in the world seems to have been smeared on the facings of the boxes (though in fact it’s “only” five kilos), but what seems to make everyone happiest is the disappearance, at last, of all the old hammer-and-sickle emblems.
The physical problems have been matched by goings-on in the opera and ballet companies. The task is to modernise an organisation still mired in Soviet employment practices: many contracts here are for life. Alexander Vedernikov, music director from 2001, over- saw a sturdy attempt to update an ossified repertoire; a clever new production of Eugene Onegin staged by Dmitri Chernyakov caused outrage among the more conservative, with grande dame Galina Vishnevskaya, for years the opera’s prima donna assoluta, storming out of the building and vowing never to return. Vedernikov left in dudgeon after eight years,
saying: “All decisions here are taken by people with no connection to music”; the theatre had “none of the characteristics of an artistic organi sation”. Leonid Desyatnikov, a composer who had gained notoriety with his provocative opera Rosenthal’s Children, which outraged some red-faced patriots and saw demonstra- tions of hastily whistled-up nationalist youth groups outside the theatre, took over briefly as artistic director, overseeing a crazy college of five “chief conductors”. When Desyatnikov left (also unhappily), this arrangement frag- mented; now chief conductor Vassily Sinaisky appears secure in his position as creative direc- tor of the opera with a five-year contract, and stability seems to have returned. Things were no better in the ballet company.
The veteran, dictatorial Yuri Grigorovich, who maintained an iron grip over the company for decades, finally left in 1995 to the relief of many, but during the following nine years three directors came and went. In 2004, Alexei Ratmansky, Bolshoi-trained but a man who had worked extensively abroad, took over and created a four-year golden period for the com- pany, broadening the repertoire and renewing a jaded corps de ballet. But the conservative faction saw the back of him too in 2008, and his successor Yuri Burlaka also left before time. A power struggle earlier this year con- cerning the succession saw some exceptionally racy photographs of someone looking very like contender Gennady Yanin appearing on a rogue website not dissimilar to that of the Bolshoi. “Ballet dancer in gay shock” rather
Curtain up on the refurbished interior of the Bolshoi in Moscow
surprisingly put paid to any ambitions Yanin had, and the job went instead to 41-year-old Sergei Filin, to the great joy of most bal- letomanes: a lifelong Bolshoi dancer, he is also an innovator whose horizons stretch rather further than the Kremlin up the road. The man presiding over all this apparent chaos for the past 11 years is general director Anatoly Iksanov, an engagingly avuncular cove who filters cigarette smoke through his grey moustache and drops dry little ironic comments that make light of the horrors of running the place. Vedernikov’s departure? “Now he can go and shrink another company …” The bus-station comings-and-goings? “Well, a man who sits in one place for a long time can lose his drive … ” No overall artistic director? “Who wants all decisions to be made by just one megalomaniac … ?” This sounds like a not particularly veiled reference to Valery Gergiev, whose Mariinsky opera and ballet in St Petersburg have completely eclipsed the Bolshoi for years, and is the only face of Russian opera as far as the outside world is concerned. The Bolshoi has to fulfil a mind-numbing
number of roles: court opera to the Kremlin – performing a minimum 50 per cent Russian repertoire – catwalk for glitteratsky molls and gangsters, park-and-bark opera for diehard traditionalists, along with making a shy attempt to enter the operatic twenty-first century in the teeth of much audience resistance; and frankly the opera’s performance in recent years has been very patchy, with a few high points and much dross. But Iksanov is sanguine. “I’ve been here for
12 interesting years,” he says. “Now we have our theatre back, and it’s time to be the best again.” The Bolshoi is back in town; maybe, finally, Gergiev will have reason to cast a nervous eye over his shoulder.
12 November 2011 | THE TABLET | 27
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