An opera set in Ukraine that celebrates, not Russian victory, but Russian dignity in defeat? Borodin's Prince Igor may seem an odd choice to bring to London as part of the UK-Russian Year of Culture but the first visit of Moscow's Novaya Opera was planned long before Putin's little Crimean adventure.
Prince Igor is a rarity in this country, best known for providing memorable tunes for the Broadway musical Kismet. In Russia it’s a national monument, even though Borodin left it incomplete at his death in 1887. Novaya Opera uses the standard completion by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, with some textual rearrangement by stage director Yuri Alexandrov.
The five performances on consecutive days (all conducted by Jan Latham-Koenig, a Brit who is the company’s chief conductor) require multiple castings in the principal roles. On the opening night, the singing was echt-Russian, chorus and soloists performing with resonant power if not always with finesse. As Igor and his wife Yaroslavna, Sergey Artamonov and Elena Popovskaya have big beasts of voices, sometimes thrilling, sometimes a little raw for comfort, but they and everyone else onstage are let down by the production.
Alexandrov’s tampering with the order of scenes causes little harm; by contrast, his staging, wobbling dangerously between Z-movie realism and tawdry exoticism, inflicts serious damage. Even the celebrated Polovstian Dances, delivered with a mighty orchestral blast, can’t save the evening. The movement throughout is clumsy, the costumes risible and the sets cumbersome: Popovskaya sang her final aria to the accompaniment of backstage shouts as technicians struggled with a set change. It seems that, in opera as in other things, Russia does things differently.
Until Saturday (020 7845 9300, eno.org)
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