"Muffled Voices" Sounded Bright: Two Modern Operas Premiered at Helikon-Opera

Chamber operas by our contemporaries — female composers from Russia and the USA — were performed in Moscow at the "Muffled Voices" festival: the skill of the singers and the production team convinces us of the genre's viability.

The international festival of contemporary chamber operas by female composers, "Muffled Voices," is organized by the non-profit organization Lyrica Classic Entertainment, headed by producer and opera singer Yulia Petrachuk. The festival opened in February of this year at the Moscow International House of Music and continued with events in the Chamber Hall of Zaryadye. Several premieres also took place in Yaroslavl and Tula. At the end of May, the festival returned to Moscow and showcased two new operas on the stage of the Helikon Opera.

The festival program features several highlights. It includes chamber operas by Tatyana Chudova, a prominent Russian composer and professor at the Moscow Conservatory. The festival is dedicated to her memory and 80th anniversary. The operas showcased in the program are Tatyana's Dream, Russian Women, Professor Dowell's Head, and Von Meck—Tchaikovsky. Additionally, the program includes operas by contemporary young Russian composers such as Alina Nebykova (Zhdana), Alina Podzorova (Periodic Table), and Anna Kuzmina (Dreams and Not Dreams). Furthermore, operas by American female composers are also featured, including Cabildo by Amy Mercy Beach, Proving by Missy Mazzoli, and Blues Call by Ann LeBaron. In total, the festival presents ten new works over a six-month period. Even the few works that have already had stage practice are relatively unknown to music lovers, and most of the works are being presented by the festival for the first time.

The Helikon page of the festival is dedicated to the horror opera: both works performed reproduce an atmosphere of fear and doom on stage. For the first of them, the showing at Helikon was a premiere, the very first public performance. The mini-opera "Zhdana" is a twenty-minute work about a family secret and a family curse with a libretto by Alexander Kapustkin. The work is based on the story of the same name by Alexey Nebykov (such is the creative family union — Alexey and Alina Nebykov, a writer and composer). Alina Nebykova is a student of Tatyana Chudova, but she has a completely unique style, different from the language of her professor, which the audience could repeatedly get acquainted with at other events of "Muffled Voices."

Nebykova's composition pleases with simplicity, melody, and clear harmonic solutions - sometimes it seems that the entire orchestral accompaniment (the vocalists and choir are accompanied by an instrumental quintet, headed by the pianist, the musical director of the festival Karina Pogosbekova) is based on two chords, on the constant juxtaposition of major and minor. However, due to this simplicity and even a certain monotonous uniformity, Nebykova achieves that the hall is filled with an atmosphere of numbness, enchantment, and mysticism of what is happening. The short running time of the work is perceived as a very long and holistic statement about the predetermination, the predestined fates of its characters - the lonely girl Zhdana, whose will is bound by the ghosts of the past, and the Young Man who accidentally wanders in to see her, trying to tear her out of this enchanted circle, but fails.

Elizaveta Korneeva's immersive production of the opera was performed in the foyer of the Small Hall of Helikon, which surprised the audience. Many did not have enough seats, so they were forced to crowd at the doors and watch the performance standing up.

The leading soloists of Helikon Opera were invited to perform the main parts - mezzo-soprano Alexandra Kovalevich and tenor Sergei Ababkin, whose large and bright voices sounded magnificent in this new music. The roles of numerous ghosts — Zhdana's deceased relatives — were brilliantly embodied by the choristers of the ARIELLE vocal ensemble under the direction of Elmira Dadasheva, and the plastic solution of the production was embodied by masters of sports in aesthetic gymnastics and participants of the show "Dances" on TNT Anastasia and Victoria Mikhaylets. The central element of the scenography was a large frame of an imaginary mirror-portal through which Zhdana communicated with the other world. In addition, a large wardrobe and an impressive chest were installed in the hall: the meager furnishings of the heroine's home. Red woolen ropes visualized the threads of fate stretched across the entire hall, which also contained a hint of the bloody denouement of the opera.

After the intermission, the audience went to the White Columned Hall of Princess Shakhovskaya (Chamber Stage of Helikon-Opera), where they were immediately immersed in an illusory, deadening atmosphere: the floor was covered with dried grass, and the stage was strewn with earth, dried flowers and thorns. Thus, director Elizaveta Korneeva and set designer Yulia Staroverova immediately introduced the audience to the darkness of hopelessness and death that reigns in the festival's next opera.

The one-act horror opera "Proving Up" by American composer Missy Mazzoli with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, based on the story of the same name by Karen Russell, tells the story of the notorious American dream, the ephemeral pursuit of which is shown through the story of the Zegner family, settlers in Nebraska in the 1870s. The work was commissioned by the Washington National Opera, Omaha Opera, and New York's Miller Theater, which first presented this opera in 2018. After the world premiere, the work was repeatedly performed in the United States - it was staged at the Pittsburgh Opera, Las Vegas Opera, the University of Baltimore, etc. Despite the popularity of the opera in the United States, it has never traveled beyond its borders, and its debut in Russia is truly a historic event. Missy Mazzoli is certainly a talented and competent composer who became one of the first women (along with Jeanine Tesori) to receive a commission to compose an opera for the Metropolitan Opera and was also nominated for a Grammy Award.

The theme of death, the tragic end of a family chasing the American dream, is presented by director Korneeva allegorically, not showing murders on stage, but through the nakedness of the characters: each of them, throwing off their clothes, seems to return to the starting point, the moment when they were not yet born and, accordingly, were not overwhelmed by the passions inherent in human society.

The opera "Proving" is incredibly complex, both rhythmically and vocally, but the artists approached the work with full dedication. To depict death and mystical moods, Missy finds unusual orchestral techniques, such as using acoustic guitars as percussion to sound like rain, which the main characters wait for throughout the opera; the harpsichord accompanies the part of the youngest participant in the story - 11-year-old boy Miles, whose music is designed in the Baroque style, and harmonicas are the leitmotif of the Phantom (The Sodbuster), who personifies all those who unsuccessfully walked towards the American Dream and paid a considerable price for its achievement.

Mazzoli's musical language combines the style of expressionism with elements of neoclassicism when a dense, rich, rather aggressive sound fabric is suddenly interrupted by transparent harmonious harmonies, referring to the archaic polyphony of the late Renaissance. The opera is characterized by a unique melody, the vocal parts combine melodiousness and harsh expressiveness.

The opera was brilliantly performed by six soloists — Zhasur Khaidarov (The Sodbuster) and Vasilisa Shaplyko (Taller — one of the sisters of the Zegner family) from the Bolshoi Theatre Youth Opera Program, Mariinsky Theatre soloist Pelageya Kurennaya (Littler — the second Zegner sister), finalist of the TV show "The Voice" David Sanikidze (Miles), Carnegie Hall soloist in New York and festival producer Yulia Petrachuk (Mrs. Zegner — the mother of the family), soloist of the Moscow Conservatory Opera Theatre Kirill Panfilov (Johannes Zegner — the father of the family) — accompanied by the Art Music Orchestra under the direction of British conductor Jeremy Walker. The singers' bright and expressive voices managed to convey to the public all the unusual beauty of the new opera, using sound to outline its heroes' complex, extraordinary images.

Photos: Vladimir Ivanov

Article by Alexander MATUSEVICH

Translation from the original article from the newspaper "Culture"

05/30/2024