Miecysłav Weinberg’s The Idiot, based on the Dostoevsky novel, was composed in 1986/7 but didn’t get a full premiere until 2013 in Mannheim. The neglect of Weinberg’s music in USSR/Russia is probably explained by him being a Polish Jew but why he’s so little known elsewhere is a bit of a mystery as The Idiot shows that The Passenger wasn’t a fluke. Anyway, The Idiot got a second outing at Salzburg in 2024 in a rather complex production by Krysztof Warlikowski.
Laurent Pelly’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was recorded for video at La Monnaie – De Munt in 2023. It’s a severely minimalist production set somewhere, around 1900 or so. I say somewhere because there’s nothing very Russian about it. It could be any country gentry and peasants scenario followed by a society ball. There are no uniforms in sight. Even Gremin wears ordinary evening clothes, albeit with orders and medals.
Mizzy Mazzoli’s latest opera The Listeners is now available on the OperaVision channel on Youtube. It’s a Den Norske Opera production recorded in Oslo a couple of months ago and it’s very interesting. There are several short trailers etc on the channel that you can use to get an idea of what it’s about and what it sounds like.
operaramblings 