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St. Petersburg Chamber Opera


Press statements about the theatre

Few companies can compare to this one… From its very first day it has lived not by the laws of opera, but by those of theatre. The harmony of the serious and the amusing, the problematic and the diverting… Such variety and scope are amazing in opera."

Iskusstvo Leningrada, 1987

"The main characteristics of stage director Yuri Alexandrov‘s signature are his musicality and extraordinary thought-processes. He is one of the country‘s most interesting and progressive directors."

Muzikalnaya Zhizn, 1987

"Fascinated by the theatre, the public becomes serious, ready to accept ‘severity‘. How unexpected this is in opera, which has always been distanced from the audience by the ‘fourth wall‘..."

Teatralnaya Zhizn, 1988

"The directing style of Alexandrov the comedy-maker is marked by joyful, multi-layered productions steeped in parody. His artistic imagination when it comes to stunts and pranks is unlimited… His rehearsals are like a fascinating game. But behind this there is always a precisely thought-out concept. The company does a great deal of analytical work before every production. ‘The work of the director,‘ Alexandrov believes ‘should be as original as that of the composer and the librettist.‘"

Smena, 1988

"... The concerts at the international festival in Karelia, and the Leningrad Chamber Opera in particular, delighted and amazed the audiences in Kostomuksha and the many Finns from Kukhmo."

Sovietskaya Kultura, 1989

"The fresh shoot of the small stage, grafted onto the 150 year old trunk of Russian opera, has come into bloom before the tree has had time to wither."

Rondo (Finland), 1989

"The Leningrad Chamber Theatre is prepared to take risks. It is always seeking out the new, looking into the unknown, torturing itself, arguing. It is alive!"

Teatralny Leningrad, 1990

"Opera performances are once again being staged at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. During the Congress of Compatriots, the former imperial stage witnessed the premiere of Domenico Cimarosa‘s opera-buffa Il matrimonio segretto to great acclaim.
Representatives of many noble Russian families attended the reception in honour of the event. On behalf of the assembly, Pyotr Alexeyevich Orlov expressed his deep gratitude to the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera for restoring the forgotten traditions of Petersburg culture."

Severo-Zapad Information Agency, 1991

"… The St. Petersburg Chamber Opera staged a performance yesterday at the Hermitage Theatre. The Hermitage Theatre is the oldest surviving theatre building in Russia today, and the performance by the company of the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera, which has no stage of its own, could open a new page in the theatre‘s history."

Smena, 1991

"The St. Petersburg Chamber Opera Company has marked its fifth birthday. That in itself is a pleasant surprise. Over the past years, the Theatre has not only won its battle against economic hardships and myriad ‘arts supervisory‘ bureaucrats; it has also presented thirteen operas to the public. The Theatre is working. The Theatre is alive."

Smena, 1992

"The Alexandrinsky Theatre has witnessed the first Russian performance of Gaetano Donizetti‘s opera-buffa Viva la madre! The Theatre‘s Artistic Director Yuri Alexandrov has staged a supremely lyrical production about how an opera company is preparing for a new premiere… And once again we can see that the homeless St. Petersburg Chamber Opera Company has an intense artistic programme, managing to stage productions practically al fresco."

Chas Pik, 1993

"In shuffling this pack of ‘merry scenes‘ before the eyes of the disheartened audience, a technique totally dissimilar to the lyrical treatment Tchaikovsky‘s Eugene Onegin is normally given, the director in turns amuses and irritates us, for example take the joyful cancan of Larina the ‘merry widow‘ and the young-looking, sprightly nanny… The production gradually acquires some kind of avant-garde ambiguity and unity of action. We see things somewhat crookedly, as in a bizarre dream..."

Kommersant-Daily, 1994

"Onegin is the Chamber Theatre‘s best work. The production is a fantasy based on Tchaikovsky‘s work, daring and unique in its own way: this stage version of Eugene Onegin is unlike any other. It has the ability to irritate and antagonise, particularly respectable audiences. But also the ability of making one fall in love with it… Everything is imbued with the delicate aroma of the age, myriad artistic and associative ideas and the director‘s unique musings, while familiar melodies and phrases begin to sound unusual on the stage."

Mariinsky Teatr, 1994

"The director, in casting aside all the traditions of ‘Russian grand opera‘, is not aiming for a general effect. It is the details, the gestures, the looks, that are important in his production. Thus the chorus is made up of individuals, characters, unlike the standard mass of extras on larger stages."

Reklama-Shans, 1995

"With Boris, a Russian diptych has appeared in the Theatre, a unique Pushkin dialogue that reflects the two sides of the Russian mentality. If everything in Eugene Onegin is light, harmony and beauty, then in Boris we see suffering of the soul and the heart, unbearable agony and inner confusion. Thus do the lines of history extend from Pushkin via Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky to the present day, as ambiguous and contradictory as the light and dark in Alexandrov‘s productions."

Reklama-Shans, 1995

"One of the greatest peculiarities of all of Alexandrov‘s productions is their delicate refutation of that canonical pathos that makes opera such an inaccessible genre. However, neither Alexandrov nor his St. Petersburg Chamber Opera Company could be called champions of the avant-garde. Quite the reverse, they exist naturally in the context of classical opera. But the reputation as an original interpreter of the canons that Yuri Alexandrov enjoys is absolutely justified… He succeeds in solving the main problem of musical theatre today: not making the classical up-to-date artificially, but giving it a contemporary sound in simple, distinct ways."

Kommersant-Daily, 1995

"The mosaic of interchanging fragments creates a general impression of keeping true to the age. The director has succeeded in creating not a work about The Gamblers but rather a work about Shostakovich‘s Gamblers, about the composer himself, his judgement on the world and his hopes."

Peterburgsky Teatralny Zhurnal, 1996

"With his production of Dmitry Shostakovich‘s The Gamblers, the complex and rarely successful genre of the ‘documentary spectacle‘ has brought greater success to the opera director than many dramatic theatre directors have known, and the opera singers made up an acting ensemble that can portray both detailed psychology and Gogol-like grotesque."

Pyatnitsa, 1996

"The most appealing thing about the new Rigoletto is the youth of its characters, the freshness of their voices, the youthful acting of the singers. Here there are none of the marks of those opera productions from the times they were given stilted, academic treatment."

Vecherny Peterburg, 1997

"The young company creates the impression of being the ‘liveliest‘ theatre in the city."

Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1998

"In The Queen of Spades we deal with a well-conceived, virtuoso realisation of the series of associations that Tchaikovsky‘s opera generates in humanity at the end of the 20th century. Alexandrov, in creating his own ‘Pushkin‘s trilogy‘, chose this very path… By rethinking the motivation of the characters‘ actions, by placing them in different historical situations, the director has realised the hermeneutic depth of the work, making it a truth of the entire cultural century."

Mariinsky Teatr, 2000

"This dynamic, elegant production resembles the Carnival in Venice - a hymn to life, the sun and love. It is not by chance that at the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera Company La Belle Helene is called a lyric comedy."

Rossiskaya Muzikalnaya Gazeta, 2000

"The Rayok appeared as the second part of Gamblers 1942 about Shostakovich, which has run for several seasons now. It is a complicated work - of the kind that makes one feel a lump in one‘s throat, at one and the same time that it is bright and poetically sublime… It is not just thus directed by Yuri Alexandrov. That is how it is performed. With striking energy, passion, even assiduity. Not for the first time has Yuri Alexandrov ‘triumphed‘ with contemporary opera."

Kultura, 2001

"Not for the first time has Yuri Alexandrov ‘triumphed‘ with contemporary opera (Smelkov‘s The Skewbald Dog Running at the Edge of the Sea). Recall Rilke‘s Cornet for which the Theatre won a Golden Mask… 21st century theatre should leave its heirs something unique and individual - not mere post-modernist collages of what has already been done in previous centuries."

Kultura, 2001

"For many years, the Bolshoi has not seen such a stylish, lucid, conceptual work by a director (referring to Yuri Alexandrov‘s production of Khovanshchina at the Bolshoi Theatre)."

Vek, 2002

"Donizetti‘s comic opera Don Pasquale was premiered at the Hermitage Theatre. Yuri Alexandrov and his St. Petersburg Chamber Opera Company did not let their public down. The childishly shameless story of a rich old man deceived by an entire band of scoundrels was performed with ease and joie de vivre."

Kommersant-Daily, 2003

"It was an unprecedented event - for the first time in its history, the Arena di Verona, the world‘s largest and most prestigious theatre, invited a Russian director to stage one of the Italian classics - Puccini‘s Turandot. Russians are rarely invited to stage Russian operas abroad, let alone operas from the European repertoire. But Yuri Alexandrov is one of the few opera directors, in fact probably the only one, to be invited. Despite the rules of the game at the Arena di Verona, rules that have emerged over almost a century, Alexandrov has staged another of his unique productions of immense quality. And in Italy there were murmurs of a second Zeffirelli."

Teatralny Peterburg, 2004

"In this version by ‘provocative‘ musical theatre director Yuri Alexandrov, Artistic Director of the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera Company, Gianni Schicchi has been transformed into an opera-grotesque. Alexandrov rejects a crude portrayal of society and the denotation of positive and negative characters. Here we see a merciless view of human vices, evilly and poisonously ridiculed by the director."

Teatralny Peterburg, 2004


St. Petersburg Chamber Opera



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