On March 17 the Opera Centre presented the public a new staging, the seventh since its opening in 2002, – G. Bizet’s
Carmen. Both well-known singers (Oksana Kornievskaya as
Carmen and Oleg Dolgov as Jos&eactute;) and new soloists of the Opera Centre (Anastasia Privoznova as Michaela, Konstantin Purilkin as the Toreador and others) take part in the performance.
The director of the performance is a Macedonian Ivan Popovski who has already worked together with Galina Vishnevskaya and has staged new productions of
The Tsar’s Bride by Rimsky-Korsakov (2004) and
Rigoletto by G. Verdi (2005) in the Opera Centre. The public specially noted the interesting scenographic conception of
Carmen created by Alexey Porai-Koshitsa; the costume designer is Alla Kozhenkova constantly collaborating with the Centre. The conductor is Yaroslav Tkalenko.
“The event that has taken place today in Galina Vishnevskaya’s Opera Centre can referred to as outstanding”, says the ITAR-TASS about the premiere. As is well known, the opera was written by G. Bizet in 1874 and did not have success initially. However
Carmen was highly estimated by P. Tchaikovsky who called it a master-piece and forecast its huge popularity. Nowadays
Carmen can be found in the repertoire of nearly every opera theatre and it is performed in the majority of languages. Galina Vishnevskaya’s Opera Centre presented the public its own version of
Carmen in Russian.
Galina Vishnevskaya was quoted as saying, “…Opera is not music only, it is also a word and this word must be heard. The public, in its majority not knowing a foreign language, does not fully understand what is happening on the stage and thus it ceases to be a participant of the action, loses the contact with the artistes. Of course, it is debatable, but we have prepared a version in French as well and the public has an opportunity to listen to and compare both variants.”