25 March 2018 (Sun), 19:00 World famous Mariinsky Ballet and Opera Theatre - Opera and Concert Hall - Opera Dmitry Shostakovich. "Moscow, Cheryomushki" musical comedy in 3 acts (concert performance)
Schedule for Dmitry Shostakovich. "Moscow, Cheryomushki" musical comedy in 3 acts (concert performance) 2022
Composer: Dmitry Shostakovich Musical Preparation: Larisa Gergieva Principal Chorus Master: Pavel Teplov
Orchestra: Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra Opera company: Mariinsky (Kirov) Opera
Libretto by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky
When the composer of the very recently premiered Eleventh Symphony (1905) agreed
to the proposal to write a musical comedy he staggered many of his dedicated
followers. They had forgotten the fact that Shostakovich loved and was able to
make his laughter infectious through music – we can hear this in his most tragic
symphonies and in his works for theatre, his operas, his ballets and his
comet-like ballet and jazz suites. They had forgotten that Shostakovich was not
ashamed of his love of “easy listening” – musicals, gypsy song and jazz. They
had forgotten that in the 1930s the Maly Opera Theatre had commissioned
Shostakovich to re-orchestrate Strauss’ operetta Wiener Blut, and he had
confessed his love for Offenbach more than once “in word and in deed” (it
suffices to recall that he composed the music for the silent film New Babylon).
It is interesting that twenty years earlier Soviet Music (No 9-10, 1939)
declared that “Shostakovich has completed his Sixth Symphony and is working on
the operetta The Twelve Chairs after the eponymous work by Ilf and Petrov.” One
can only guess why the idea never came to fruition; the probable reasons – and,
of course, the possible censorship issues – that would certainly await this not
entirely ideologically restrained plot... After all, just three years earlier
Shostakovich’s vaudeville ballet The Limpid Brook based on a “collective farm”
theme following after the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had met with harsh
criticism in the newspaper Pravda (the editorial entitled “False Ballet”
appeared just a few days after the sadly famous “Muddle instead of Music”).
The plot of the operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki proposed to Shostakovich in
1958 was absolutely Soviet. The libretto by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky
related how Muscovites from communal flats moved to their own apartments in the
newly-built Cheryomushki district. Funny, touching and, at times, semi-criminal
collisions accompanied this “great migration of peoples”. And Shostakovich gave
this innocent vaudeville vivid and submissively merry music. In his New Year
interview for Soviet Music (1959, No 1) Shostakovich declared in the same Soviet
“newspeak” that “In merry and dynamic form the theme of the operetta touches on
the incredibly important issue of the construction of housing in our nation...”
But this is also where he discovered his own interest in this “incredibly
important issue”: “Here there is lyricism, a ‘cascade’, various intermedia,
dances and even an entire brief ballet scene. In terms of the music, there are
at times attractive parody elements quoting popular motifs from the recent past
as well as several songs by Soviet composers.” Moscow, Cheryomushki is a
revue production, a divertissement performance, a unique kind of interpretation
of the traditions of musical comedy from Offenbach to Dunaevsky. The leitmotif
song Moscow, Cheryomushki is an “everyday” waltz, the melodic features of which
bring to mind the popular song There Were Happy Days. For the aria of the
heroine recalling her school years Shostakovich the melody of his own brilliant
Song of the Counterplan. He also “smuggled” his stunning ballet music into the
score of the operetta , while for the parody scenes and ballet intermedia he
used In the Garden, at the Allotment, The Moon Is Shining and Ah, You, Inner
Porch, My Inner Porch, the Oira dance popular in the early 20th century and even
the thieves’ song Fried Chicken... Critics were swift to praise Shostakovich
for his sensational “turnaround in creativity” and the operetta was staged
everywhere – both in the USSR and in countries with “people’s democracies”; in
1962 the Lenfilm studios filmed Cheryomushki featuring renowned actors and
singers. Today, following a lengthy interval (due, first and foremost, to the
typically Soviet libretto), Shostakovich’s operetta – like his early ballets –
is again worthy of our attention for its musical qualities. Shostakovich
youthfully mischievous, Shostakovich laughingly returns to the stages of musical
theatres. Iosif Raiskin
Schedule for Dmitry Shostakovich. "Moscow, Cheryomushki" musical comedy in 3 acts (concert performance) 2022
|