Cinema opera Boris Godunov

[LHC]

Standard thread hijack by bsp, but again for a hopefully good reason, to get the word out about Zurich Opera's production of Boris Godunov scheduled for this weekend, and available for live streaming:

https://www.opernhaus.ch/spielplan/kalendarium/boris-godunow/2020-2021/

The day before, Die Csárdásfürstin of Emmerich Kálmán is on offer. The day after Boris G. features Maria Stuarda.

Because of the size of the orchestra required for Boris, the Zurich Opera Orchestra won't be in the pit. They are playing in their rehearsal rooms, and their contribution is then live-streamed to the Opera House, where the orchestral score is relayed over loudspeakers. Its an interesting experiment in dealing with the current restrictions, but is clearly far from ideal as an actual performance of an opera.

[Darkbloom]

Michael Volle is a very good singer but I wish they wouldn't cast baritones as Boris. A dark-toned voice is essential for that role. It might not have any real low notes but it's definitely a part for a bass.

[bluestateprommer]

Michael Volle is a very good singer but I wish they wouldn't cast baritones as Boris. A dark-toned voice is essential for that role. It might not have any real low notes but it's definitely a part for a bass.

Interestingly, in one of the accompanying articles for the Oper Zurich production, Barrie Kosky addresses this question, and notes that Michael Volle himself would probably have agreed with you:

"Was schätzt du an Michael Volle, der jetzt den Zürcher-Boris singt?
Es war mein Wunsch, Michael dafür anzufragen. Ich musste ihn dazu richtiggehend überreden, denn sein Einwand war natürlich sofort, dass Boris eine Rolle für einen Bass sei und also nicht für seine Stimmlage. Doch das ist ein Missverständnis. Mussorgski schrieb die Rolle ursprünglich für einen Bariton oder Bassbariton, denn bei der Uraufführung wurde Boris von Iwan Melnikow verkörpert, der auch Graf Tomski in Tschaikowskys 'Pique Dame' sang – eine Baritonpartie. Mussorgskis Intention war wahrscheinlich, Boris’ Stimme irgendwo zwischen Pimen, der die eigentlich grosse Bassrolle in diesem Stück ist und Warlaam, anzusiedeln. Wären alle drei Bässe, würde es eindimensional. Für mich bringt Michael etwas auf die Bühne, was kein Bassist, der normalerweise Philipp II. aus 'Don Carlos' singt, erfüllen kann: Michael hat einen Wotan, einen Hans Sachs und einen Fliegenden Holländer in seiner Seele. Das ist eine Dimension, die man nicht inszenieren kann."

Google Translation (slightly tweaked): "What do you like about Michael Volle, who is now singing the Zurich Boris?
It was my wish to ask Michael about it. I really had to persuade him to do so, because his objection was, of course, immediately that Boris was a role for a bass and not for his voice. But that's a misunderstanding. Mussorgsky originally wrote the role for a baritone or bass-baritone, because Boris was played at the premiere by Ivan Melnikov, who also sang Count Tomski in Tchaikovsky's 'Queen of Spades' - a baritone role. Mussorgski's intention was probably to locate Boris' voice somewhere between Pimen, who is actually the big bass role in this piece, and Varlaam. If all three were bass, it would be one-dimensional. For me, Michael brings something to the stage that no bassist who normally sings Philip II from 'Don Carlos' can do: Michael has a Wotan, a Hans Sachs and a Flying Dutchman in his soul. That is a dimension that cannot be staged."

The sync-ing of the orchestra and chorus with the stage action went quite well, from the two that I saw (Die Csárdásfürstin, along with Boris Godunov). The big hitch for me was that unfortunately my internet clearly was not up to the bandwidth of the BG stream (seen after the live presentation, with English subtitles), because the stream kept freezing pretty much every 6-7 seconds. Within that extremely irritating (and, of course, elitist, First World, mega-niche) limitation, or perhaps because of it, given the quarantine circumstances, it went very well. Kirill Karabits was perhaps the key musical hero of the evening, with how well he conducted. One other aspect of the production (besides the "singing books" when the chorus did their thing from 1 km away) was that Spencer Lang, as the Fool, was on stage pretty much the whole time, perhaps as the "witness to history" after the fact.

Other little factoids to note:
* Didn't realize that Brindley Sheratt is left-handed.
* I didn't quite catch the full name of the young bespectacled fellow who sang Fyodor, but he seemed a very bright chap in his interval banter with the one presenter (didn't write down her name, unfortunately), who referred to him as something like "Mika", perhaps short for Michael.

The updating to pretty much the present-day actually worked out quite well. Of course, the one meta-flaw with such an update is that anyone with a brain would demand of the False Dimitri a 23andMe DNA test to see if his DNA matched that earlier branch of the Russian royal family, and the False Dimitri would have spectacularly failed that test.