Concertisti Classica

IS Boris Godunov of Modest Musorgsky the title that inaugurates the new Season of Teatro alla Scala, Wednesday December 7, 2022 (18.00), traditional before Sant'Ambrogio, on stage until 29 December with six other replicas.

On the podium of the Scaliger teams, the Maestro Riccardo Chailly, which has chosen to present the masterpiece of the Russian composer in the original version of 1869. The direction of the show is signed by Kasper Holten, the sets are by Es Devlin, the costumes of Ida Marie Ellekilde, the videos are edited by Luke Halls, the lights are of Jonas Bǿgh.

Protagonist on stage is Ildar Abdrazakov in the eponymous role, while they are performers of the other main parts Ain Anger like Pimen, Stanislav Trofimov like Varlaam, Dmitry Golovnin such as Grigory Otrepev e Norbert Ernst like Shuysky, while Lilly Jørstad is Fyodor. The Chorus of the Teatro alla Scala is directed by the Maestro Alberto Malazzi.

Boris Godunov for the second time it opens the Verona season, after the memorable edition directed by Claudio Abbado in 1979 and directed by Juri Ljubimov. Mussorgsky's monumental work has been a recurring title at Piermarini since the Italian premiere of 1909 commissioned by Toscanini (but directed by Edoardo Vitale), directed among others by Toscanini himself but also by Guarnieri, Votto, Gavazzeni and Gergiev,

For the inauguration of the 2022/2023 Opera Season, Boris Godunov will be staged in the original 1869 version, the so-called Ur-Boris, hee dismayed his contemporaries for his innovative and realistic traits both from a dramaturgical and musical point of view and focuses on the theme of individual guilt and its inevitable consequences.

A dark and current story which echoes the theme of Verdi's Macbeth with which the Teatro alla Scala inaugurated the 2021/2022 Season. We are in the 1598: with the death of Tsar Fyodor, guards and priests exhort the people to pray that the boyar Boris Godunov agrees to ascend the throne. Finally, the coronation takes place in the square of the Kremlin cathedrals in an imposing ceremony, however disturbed by some riots. In a cell of the Chudov monastery, the elderly monk Pimen is about to finish his chronicle of the events in Russia. The chronicle will report the truth about the assassination of Tsarevich Dimitri, the legitimate heir to the throne, perpetrated on Boris's orders. Pimen narrates the crime to the novice Grigory, who, being the same age as the Tsarevich, decides to pass himself off as him to lead a revolt against Boris to seize the throne. Grigorij takes refuge in Poland avoiding arrest by crossing the border with Lithuania. The last scenes narrate events that happened in 1604: the children of Boris, Xenia and Fëdor have grown up; the Tsar now governs a country exhausted by famine in which discontent is spreading among the people and rumors about the regicide committed are multiplying, while the rebel forces led by Grigory are pressing at the borders. Haunted by the tsarevich's ghost, Boris Godunov loses his mind and dies after a last exhortation to his son Fyodor.

Riccardo Chailly and Boris Godunov
Among the by now numerous paths that make up Riccardo Chailly's more than forty years of La Scala experience, the one that crosses the Russian repertoire has a particular importance. After the precocious debut on the podium of the Masnadieri in 1978, called by Abbado to replace Gavazzeni, in 1979 Chailly achieved a warm personal success conducting Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the Lirico, followed in 1981 by the critical and interpretative puzzle represented by Soročincy's Fair by Musorgsky, solved brilliantly. In 1994 it was the turn of Prokofiev's Angel of Fire, a success that many still remember. "During the first few seasons of my musical direction - explains the Maestro - I felt it necessary to focus exclusively on the Italian repertoire, with courses dedicated to Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi's "Youth Trilogy" and the operas that had the their premiere. Today the time has come to give space to other voices that are fully part of the history of La Scala. Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov had its first Italian performance in our Theater in 1909 with the direction of Edoardo Vitale and Fëdor Šaljapin as the protagonist, and remained in the following seasons as a constant presence, in particular thanks to Arturo Toscanini who conducted it for four Seasons between 1922 and 1927, to Antonio Guarnieri who proposed it again in 1935, 1941 and 1946, and then, among others, to Antonino Votto and Gianandrea Gavazzeni. In 1979 Boris Godunov was the second non-Italian opera to inaugurate the Season on December 7 after Fidelio directed by Karl Böhm in 1974: an opening choice desired by Claudio Abbado who gave it a memorable interpretation together with the director Yuri Ljubimov. I was Abbado's assistant at the time and I remember the months of rehearsals to create a very innovative show which was also the subject of criticism but which has remained in the history of opera interpretation as well as in that of La Scala. Tullio Serafin wrote that the greatness of Boris is perhaps due to the gloomy realism with which Verdi depicts the vertigo of power in Macbeth. Presenting the two works in two consecutive inaugurations also takes on this meaning. This Boris Godunov, which as every December 7th will be filmed by the television cameras of Rai Cultura, is for me the essential point of arrival of a journey through Musorgsky's music that I began when I was very young directing the death scene of the protagonist in Florence and Bologna with a historic interpreter like Boris Christoff together with the Songs and Dances of Death, and which had an important stage in La Scala during the 1981 Mussorgsky Festival with The Fair of Soročincy directed by Sylvano Bussotti”.

The show
The show signed by Kasper Holten and his creative team offers a reading of the work centered on the themes of consciousness opposed to power and truth opposed to censorship. At the root of the director's reflection is the origin of the libretto, Pushkin's play, composed in 1825 and published in 1831. In tackling the epic of the "time of troubles", Pushkin was openly inspired by the great Shakespearean historical dramas, not only in grandeur of the fresco but also in the depth of the characters. On the other hand, it is interesting to observe how Shakespeare lived in the time of the historical Godunov. Some solutions adopted in the show are based precisely on Shakespeare's theater, such as the representation of the sense of guilt through the materialization of ghosts, real or imagined, on the stage. The specter of the Zarevič murdered by Boris to conquer power will be a recurring element, a visible sign of the guilt and finally of the madness of his assassin. Another element that will be placed in the foreground is the figure of Pimen, who we will see on stage from the outset intent on writing his chronicle, a truthful and therefore politically dangerous testimony of the facts that Boris and his scribes try to conceal. At the center of the exhibition will be exactly this reference to the truth and the need to bear witness to it. The viewer will be transported into Pimen's chronicle and therefore into history, in which past, present and future intersect and influence each other. A circular story in which violence returns as a constant.

The story, divided into seven scenes, is divided into two distinct parts which will be underlined by the insertion of an interval: in the first four scenes we witness the public coronation ceremony as a means of confusing and deceiving the people, the subversive testimony of truth of Pimen and Grigorij's decision to distort this truth to usurp power: in short we witness what happens to Boris by looking at him from the outside. In the remaining three scenes – which take place almost seven years later – we are together with Boris, we see how he tries to live with his guilt, we feel his fear and his path to madness. Here too the temporal planes intersect: the children of Boris, Fëdor and Xenia, will have the same fate as the Zarevič but also as many victims of the blind violence of Power. With the death of Boris, a circle made of ink and blood closes, in which we see history and its narration represented together. * (Boris Godunov, Teatro alla Scala, photocredit Brescia & Amisano)