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World video travel guide
Mikhailovsky Theatre to perform Eugene Onegin and
Un ballo in maschera at the Savonlinna Festival
The Mikhailovsky Theatre’s opera company will be appearing at the Savonlinna Opera Festival for the first time. Between 30 July and 3 August they will put on five performances at the medieval Olavinlinna Castle, which becomes a theatre auditorium during the festival. These will include three performances of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and two of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.
Mikhail Tatarnikov, the Mikhailovsky Theatre’s Musical Director and Principal Conductor, considers this collaboration with the Savonlinna Festival, with its rich traditions and solid reputation in musical circles, to be of great strategic importance for the theatre. “We have prepared for this tour to neighbouring Finland with a great sense of responsibility. The operas chosen for the festival fully demonstrate our abilities. Un ballo in maschera, our contribution to the bicentenary celebrations of Verdi’s birth, gives the audience an opportunity to appreciate the musicality of our orchestra and the merits of the singers. Andriy Zholdak’s conceptual staging of Eugene Onegin will demonstrate our willingness to experiment creatively. Zholdak is a director who is highly renowned in Northern Europe for his dramatic productions.”
Performers will include Mikhailovsky Theatre soloists Tatiana Ryaguzova, Marina Tregubovich, Sofia Fainberg, Evgeny Akhmedov, Dmitry Darov and Fyodor Ataskevich, as well as guest singers Elena Pankratova, Janis Apeinis, Andrey Gonyukov, Gelena Gaskarova, Irina Shishkova and others.
Un ballo in maschera is one of Verdi’s most accomplished works while being, at the same time, an opera with a complex history, having had to pass through rejections by the censors and been subjected to endless rewritings. Andrejs Žagars’ production, which critics have called “a fine spectacle without any excessive conceptual niceties or counter-intuitive approaches”, can be considered a model of traditionalism and directorial self-restraint.
Eugene Onegin, which premiered this season, has provoked a heated debate about non-traditional interpretations of Russian classics. This masterpiece of Russian opera, based on a theme from classical Russian literature, will be directed by Andriy Zholdak, who has made his sensational production even more radical for the Finnish festival performance.
Brief information about the theatre The Mikhailovsky Theatre opened in 1833 on the initiative of Grand Duke Mikhail, a brother of Nicholas I of Russia, and was home to French and German drama companies. The Russian revolution in 1917 made many foreign actors leave the country and the Mikhailovsky Theatre had to form its own company. On 6 March 1918, a performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia based on Gioacchino Rossini’s comic opera was given in the premises of the former Mikhailovsky Theatre. This event marks the starting point of the modern period of the theatre’s history. The theatre developed a repertory based on opera classics and operettas, but the specifics of the Mikhailovsky have always been its interest in the contemporary 20th century music. In the 1930s the theatre became known as the “laboratory of Soviet opera.” The Maly Theatre (which was the name of the Theatre in the Soviet period) saw the first ever productions of Dmitry Shostakovich’s operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s innovative production of The Queen of Spades (1935). In 2005, the original name – Mikhailovsky Theatre – came to the foreground and was added to the one existing since 1991: The St Petersburg Mussorgsky State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre – Mikhailovsky Theatre. Nowadays the Theatre both keeps traditions and introduces innovations to great public acclaim.
