Opera in two acts
Music Director: Evgeny Samoilov
Conductors: Evgeny Samoilov, Valery Kritskov
Stage Director: Valery Raku
Set Designer: Semyon Pastukh
Costume Designer: Galina Solovyova
Choreographer: Ivan Fadeyev
Lighting Designer: Gleb Filshtinsky
Chief stage choirmaster: Andrey Lazarev
Choirmaster: Maria Chekrkchieva
Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes with one intermission
Premiered on 17 February 2002
Recommended for 6+
Opera-goers will probably for the first time see a non-fairytale love story. Events are unfolding amid the pagan festival of Maslenitsa (the Pancake week),full of merry-making, enjoyment of life and mischief.
Maslenitsa is a short span of time between Winter and Spring, between eternal calm and eternal love (which of them do people need more?). It bursts into the fairytale people’s life to make it madly real. Mythical things are interwoven with earthly life, while earthly life rises to a myth. One has to see it.
Press
This is an obvious breakthrough in our operatic direction: from a boring pseudo-folk show the Russian opera turns into a really modern performance which has just enough of everything — the Silver Age traditions, allusions to avant-garde, and the director’s own fantasies on the given subject. The result is fresh, intriguing and impressive.
The Kultura weekly,
12–18 March 2002