The Queen of Spades at the Scala
There will or will not be Valery Gergiev? This was the question that bounced around for days in musical circles, after the cancellation of the symphonic concerts at La Scala on 14 and 16 February and the absence due to covid at the rehearsals of the Queen of spades. Some sources gave the master blocked in Moscow, others in Rome; after all, the Russian director is known for a certain mysteriousness of the movements and the not rare last minute cancellations of commitments. Then on Monday evening the Ukrainian crisis precipitated and, being Gergiev a great friend of Putin, there was talk of requests from some Scaliger unions for a “pacifist” declaration.
At the end last night at 20.02, two minutes late, the hirsute conductor got on the podium and, without making speeches, started the orchestra.
Scale: The Queen of Spades, the plot
The Queen of Spades by Pëtr Il’ič Tchaikovsky is the story of an obsession as the only fixed point of a life in which there is no room for love or anything else. Just for a fixed, obsessive idea: cards. The three cards. Three, seven, ace. The composer tells the psychological and existential precipice, the neurotic exaltation, of Hermann, an officer who gets lost in the whirlpool bringing with him the two women protagonists of the story: the old Countess and the young Lisa.
It is torment without ecstasy, anguish without salvation, crime with punishment. It is Pushkin who becomes Dostojevskji. It will then be, not for the plot but for the very high tension, the Hitchcock of Notorius [ringrazio Giulio Artom per la suggestione]. Giorgio Vigolo wrote in 1953: “In the desperate feeling of single life and its tragedy, Tchaikovsky pushes himself, with his pathos of very full humanity, to the most problematic limits of the unconscious, in a metaphysical region of mystery and terror that does so a lot close to the contemporary soul “.
Scale: The Queen of Spades in history
The Queen of Spades is from 1890 (written in six weeks in Florence; premiered on December 19 at the Marinsky theater in Petersburg), the same year as Rustic cavalry by Mascagni (premiered on May 17 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome). I do not risk comparisons, because if I said how I think I would risk being denounced for insult to the state musical religion …
The score has moments of rarefaction, livid hues, melancholy suspensions, incandescent magmas, feverish excitement, pianissimi and very strong. The environment is closed, distressing, with nightmares and tormenting visions.
Alla Scala after World War II (after the first in 1906), The Queen of Spades it has appeared a few times, but always with great depth. In 1961 conducted (with rhythmic version in Italian) by Nino Sonzogno with Leyla Gencer, Ivo Vinco and Sesto Bruscantini. In 1964 with the Bolshoi orchestra conducted by Konstantin Simeonov and Galina Visnjeskaja in the part of Lisa. In 1990 Seiji Ozawa with Vladimir Atlantov and Mirella Freni; directed by Andrei Koncialovski, scenes by Enzo Frigerio. Finally in 2005 the great Juri Temirkanov with the late Dmitri Hrovostosky in the part of Prince Eletsky and Elena Obratsova as Countess.
Scale: The Queen of Spades, the review
And here we are at last night’s show. Let’s talk first of Gergiev, probably today the most authoritative interpreter of this repertoire. If Tchaikovsky’s music is cold and desperate, the Russian conductor further fleshes it out, coming to find its infinitely small, his Higgs boson. Impressive is the obsessive obstinate of the arches in the 4th picture – the monologue of the Countess – purely Hitchcockian (it would be more correct to say – following the registry – that Hitchcock is Tchaikovsky …). Then the 6th picture, on the river bank, probably one of the most beautiful moments in the history of music. A duet of deaf people: she crazy for love, he just crazy. In the end he runs to play the three cards, she throws herself into the freezing Neva, like Tosca from Castel Sant’Angelo. Here soprano and tenor give an extraordinary test of singing and acting; here the direction finds its best moment, with the gray mists of the river; here the orchestra draws its dramatic background texture. To take your breath away.
In the orchestra a special place for the lugubrious color of the bass clarinet, which accompanies the scene of the Countess; and for the trombones, to which the theme of the three cards is entrusted, and which support the musical fabric of the whole work with their wonderful dirty sound.
Lisa is Asmik Grigorian, the forty-one-year-old Lithuanian singer who is probably the best soprano in business for the late 19th-early 20th century repertoire. Recent interpretations of her, in particular, are essential Wozzeck of Berg, Salome by Richard Strauss, The dead City by Korngold (at La Scala in 2019), Manon Lescaut by Puccini. Grigorian has a broad, confident and luminous voice in every register, capable of a great emission, both harsh and hot, of flames and cold. And on stage he has an exceptional, charismatic energy: he is inside the character, he sings and acts without understanding the boundary between the two modes. A great, great artist. The best, no ifs and buts. There is no debate.
Hermann is the young Najmiddin Mavlyanov; born in Uzbekistan but raised musically in the Stanislavsky Academy in Moscow, at his Scala debut, he has the painful and tortured, hysterical and desperate voice of the typical “Russian tenor”, whatever this category means. He also has great vocal volume and manages to live up to Asmik Grigorian.
There Countess is Julia GertsevaRussian mezzo-soprano known in Italy, already present in a minor part in the Lady Scaligera by Temirkanov from 2005. Her scene, that of the bedroom, takes your breath away and she plays it with a lugubrious pianissimo that seems to have already been sung from beyond.
The “secondary” parts are also of great quality, first of all Count Tomsky / Roman Burdenko, Polina / Elena Maximova and Eletsky / Alexey Markov.
There directed by Matthias Hartmann it is thin, cold, polarized on the extremes of total black / total white, it makes the singers “act” and uses the play of light, half-lights and shadows. The choice to stage a character who does not appear in the score, the Count of Saint-Germain, the Countess’s ancient lover, seemed more a craft than an invention of genius.
Volker Hintermeier’s scenography – dominated by gigantic chandeliers – is based on eight large monoliths that combine in different ways in the various scenes, transforming themselves into columns of lights, large mirrors, large curtains. As the director said in the press conference: “Doing theater with nothing”.
Direction on the whole sufficient but, being precisely based on subtraction, the galleryists did not like it, who whistled loudly at the end. For these people, everything they don’t know about Zeffirelli is not directed, they would likeAida with elephants, perhaps alternating with the Mediterranean blood of Cavalleria Rusticana… And they warmed up a little even in the face of Asmik Grigorian’s immense artistic test. Yet another demonstration of the usual immortal hard core of the average Scaligero.
Ukraine: Hall, “Gergiev condemns or with Scala closes”
If the Russian conductor, Valery Gergiev, at the Teatro alla Scala to conduct La Dama di Picche, should he not “take a precise position against the invasion” of Ukraine by Russia, La Scala in Milan would be ready to “interrupt the collaboration” with the artist, always considered on good terms with Putin. The mayor of Milan, Beppe Sala, said this during a meeting with reporters at Palazzo Marino. “Valery Gergev has repeatedly declared his closeness to Vladimir Putin. In agreement with the superintendent – he added – we asked him to take a precise position against the invasion”. “In case he does not do it we are ready to give up the collaboration, if he does not take a position against the invasion tonight The Queen of Spades will not take place or will take place with another teacher”.
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