Boris Godunov

Nastoyashchiy russkiy

What a privilege! What a pleasure. Owing to technology I can watch 'foreign' language art films and theatre productions in the comfort of my home. On DVD.

Russian works performed by Russian artists have a depth, breadth and scope that elsewhere can hardly be emulated.

My then longtime companion Afrikaans actor Ernst Eloff was not partial to the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky until a friend forced him to listen to a recording by a Russian orchestra with a Russian conductor.

I'm besotted with Russian music and literature. It's the country that gave the world playwright Anton Chekhov, authors Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn et al. And composers Rachmaninov, Prokof'iev, Stravinsky.. And in this case Modest Musorgsky.

I have his Boris Godunov on DVD in a Gran Teatre del Licau production directed by Willy Decker, conducted by Sebastian Weigle with Finnish powerhouse bass Matti Salminen in the title role. It's a 'modern' look at the work with the tsar an almost Hitler-like figure and it's excellent.

However. the 1990 production of the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg is an exact copy of the 1983 Andrey Tarkovsky direction of the opera. Need I say more? Robert Lloyd reprises the title role. He slots in with the Russians perfectly. His Boris is tormented; he knows he has an insurmountable task to rule a country. When two kids want to touch his coat in adoration, he flees in a panic. Brilliant. Brilliant.

From the included booklet - In rehearsal: "First meeting of the chorus. Andrei talks about the crowd - the Russian people. How they will crawl out of holes filled with the rubbish of history. Their movement is to be that of fog: slow and heavy. Then, when they plead with Boris to become their Tsar, their movement should be like rye in the field."

That says it all. A superb, supreme film director at work on the stage, subtly creating Rembrandt- and Hieronymus Bosch-like pictures, masterfully lighting them and drawing extraordinary performance from all the singer-actors. Valery Gergiev, stalwart of Russian conductors, leads the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus.

Yes, I'm swooning. 10/10

The music is great, the singers are tops, the costumes the best. So why do I not think much of this production ? Mainly because the stage sets are non-existent and you cannot use costumes and lots of people to replace the settings. Granted, it may have been done out of some necessity, but not having the right sets simply loses a lot of the story's impact. One innovative good plus was showing the live child Dmitry as a ghost. And having a girl play Fedor is as foolish as always, especially when you see a woman with make-up running to Boris and her breasts bobbing as befits a girl and not a boy.

I was really looking forward to seeing this production,but found that the surreal aspects of some of the staging,and the Dali-esque properties,and parts of the settings were so weird that it was interfering with my enjoyment of a profound musical experience.Let's take a look,and see what I'm talking about.

1.)The fog in the opening-totally unnecessary.And the scene should have ended after the blind pilgrims enter the church.

2.)Coronation scene-entrance of the guards and procession of the nobles-really well done.But the Dali touch of the bell in the background-silly and stupid.Not at all realistic.

3.)In the monestary cell sequence;There seems to be some staging showing the murder of the prince,and the inquiry thereafter which ,I guess,is modeled on the film technique of using a flashback.But it doesn't work here.(I found it to be distracting.)And the saintly monk,Pimen,who represents the force of nemesis,looks,with his outlandish beard,wig,and psychotic stare,like Charles Manson.

4.)The stylized books and maps,in the fourth scene,were really unbelievable.

5.)Polish scenes were good,but Rangoni looked like a creature from outer space.

6.)Final Boris scenes were good;nothing intruded.

7.)Kromy forest scene started out really good,but had a corny ending.Everybody lying down,and pretending that they were dead.

It was these blunders in staging that kept this from being a totally satisfying experience.

Boris Godunov is an opera that I was introduced to with Boris Christoff singing and performing the death scene on the 1956 broadcast. Having been riveted and moved, I really wanted to see the whole opera. Regardless of what version it's in, the opera is a masterpiece, some of the music in the death scene really haunts and speaks to me in particular.

This production is brilliant, and the only video I can think of at the moment that uses Mussorgsky's own orchestration. A big part of the success of the production other than the superb music is Valery Gergiev's conducting, which brings out the emotion of the score and the characteristics of the opera's composer Modest Mussorgsky superlatively.

The costumes and sets are ornate and evocative, the orchestra are superb and the chorus are solid in the singing if not quite so good in the acting. I loved the staging, perhaps it is not quite what you expect, but I loved it, particularly the idea for actors to portray sculptures in the Polish Garden scene and the psychological quality it has.

The performances from the principals can't be faulted, right down from Robert Lloyd's exceptionally well sung and acted performance in the title role to the tour-de-force that is Olga Borodina's Marina. All in all, brilliant. 10/10 Bethany Cox

This Mussorgsky opera of the 1872 version was filmed at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1990. It was The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden production by Andrei Tarkovsky (famous for his cinema, "Andrei Rublev"). This DVD version was directed by Stephen Lawless and television version by Humphrey Burton. The leads being sung by Robert Lloyd, Olga Borodina, Alexei Steblianko, Sergei Leiferkus and the orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev of the Kirov Opera of St Petersburg.

The GRAMOPHONE states, "This is masterly on almost every count, musical and visual, and would now be the outright choice for this work in all media...Front stage, as it were, are some of the best of the current generation of Russian singers...Gergiev is another of the recording's heros. Seldom, if ever... has the score sounded so hauntingly beautiful and apt for this huge panorama of seventeenth-century Russia... Don't miss this riveting experience."

Personally,I experienced the comment by my father, Dr. D W Stomberg, many years ago that the San Francisco staged production was boring, he almost fell asleep during the presentation.

Not now, say I, this is all of the aforementioned and more! Thank you Philips for giving us this DVD. It is much appreciated.

Dag Stomberg