The annual visit of the Mariinsky Theater’s traveling opera troupe from St. Petersburg came a little early this year. The themes that unite the Kennedy Center double-bill of Verdi’s Otello and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades are self-destructive obsessions and tenor heroes who become villains. Who better to perform The Queen of Spades than the Mariinsky Theater, which hosted the world premiere of The Queen of Spades on December 19, 1890? The opera is thoroughly Russian,…
It’s December, which means that much of the classical music concert schedule is devoted to some holiday that apparently occurs near the end of the month. Consult our Holiday Concert Agenda and our Handel’s Messiah Agenda, if that is the sort of thing that interests you. Let’s try to keep the regular agenda free of that stuff. There is plenty to talk about without it. VOICES: >> The annual residency of the Kirov Opera, the…
As reportedly happened during the Kirov Opera’s visit to Washington last year, the best performance of the group’s residency this week at the Kennedy Center was saved for last. On Sunday afternoon, conductor Valery Gergiev led a concert performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s modern opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that was an incendiary triumph. Combined with the three evenings of Shostakovich’s chamber music from the Emerson Quartet on my schedule this week, the Russian composer’s…
The Shakespeare in Washington festival continues this week with the visit of the Kirov Ballet to the Kennedy Center Opera House. This year, the resident troupe of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater has brought its traveling production of Leonid Lavrovsky’s choreography of Romeo and Juliet. Sergei Prokofiev wanted to premiere the sublime music of this ballet (op. 64) at the Mariinsky in the 1930s, but the theater ultimately balked. The Bolshoi Theater in Moscow also accepted…
This is a good week for hearing 20th-century symphonic repertoire, even though the National Symphony Orchestra is on another break. As we approach the first major event of the NSO’s season, the two-week Shostakovich festival in November, we will have the chance Since the NSO Shostakovich festival in November has been cancelled (due to Mstislav Rostropovich’s health problems), this week is our only chance to celebrate the Dmitri Shostakovich centenary some more. MODERN: >> On…
Members of the Kirov Opera and its Orchestra, normally in residence at the historic Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, come to the Kennedy Center periodically to present touring productions of operas and other great pieces of music. Last night, we were in the Opera House to see the first performance of their staging of Giacomo Puccini’s last and perhaps greatest opera, Turandot. It was an excellent show, with well-performed music and a splashy, colorful…
