… It was a performance about Russia and her vast lands and history. An opera
about both Tolstoy and Prokofiev that has a contemporary
Weltanschauung.
Irena Leina. Kultura
Konchalovsky's solution is brilliant: the action takes place on a convex dome
like the curved surface of the Earth. This nicely reflects the circularity of
the waltz music in the “peace” themes, while its ceaselessly changing landscape
gives the “war” theme a dizzy, global feel. All this is splendidly cinematic:
under swirling Turner skies , the battling armies and oppressed multitudes shunt
endlessly to and fro while acts of casual brutality and hopeless heroism suggest
war's pity, terror and confusion. Prokofiev's atmospheric music emerges in all
its glory thanks to Gergiev's magic in the pit.
Michael Church. The Independent
Konchalovsky has brilliantly met the fundamental task: to stage a vivid,
dynamic, visually intense production, to embody the heroic and patriotic idea of
the opera without any false pathos. An entire gallery of Russian characters,
living, unpretentious, natural and life-like, comes to life, contemplates,
suffers and acts within the space of the opera. On the huge stage of the
Mariinsky Theatre, rigged out with the new imported rotating circle, the stage
director stealthily, like an army commander, has mixed up Russian and French
regiments, a partisan division and the peasant militia, one after another
recreating the Battle of Borodino, the Shevardino Redoubt, Moscow streets aflame
and the shooting of French “arsonists”. The auditorium burst into applause when
the pure starry sky was reproduced on the white synthetic back curtain of the
stage, the Universe with its myriad stars, the impetuously rushing clouds of
smoke, the white stone walls and golden cupolas of Moscow illumined by the
flame. Also effective was the rousing “red cockerel” of the fire with its
spreading wings.
Larisa Kazanskaya. Russian Music
Gazette
This is a serious effort, influenced no doubt by the perceived tastes on the
international audience that awaits it. And Konchalovsky has shunned any imposed
outside “interpretation”. George Tsypin's sets emphasize the opera's cosmic
nature by placing the action on a convex surface, apparently the top of a huge,
mostly unseen globe. Tatyana Noginova's period costumes – especially the
soldier's uniforms – are spectacular in their detail. The singing was
splendid by any standard and little short of astonishing when one bears in mind
that all 57 roles (after the cuts) are cast solely from the company.
George Loomis. Musical America
Your heart thumps when you hear the delicate, inexpressibly tender melody of
the waltz and suddenly the stage rumbles and flies upwards under the feet of the
dancing Natasha and Andrei, carrying off strange faces, figures frozen still,
Sonya, Pierre, Akhrosimova, the entire disordered world in all its varied
colours… And the director’s discovery so stuns us with its unexpected subtlety
and the psychological truth comprising the very essence of Tolstoy’s deep words.
Olga Gladkova. Smena