Vienna State Opera (live stream), 27/01/2022

Tchaikovsky : The Queen of Spades

Chorus and Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Valery Gergiev

I got off to a shaky start with this live-stream, because the Vienna State Opera app's sound was absolutely terrible, with an echo that blurred everything.  I had to resort to an HDMI cable and the State Opera's website to get a decent rendering, so the first five minutes or so were a bit of a dead loss.  That technical issue resolved, I was then faced with a production which, I freely confess, completely escaped me.  The single setting is either an interior entrance courtyard, or an entrance hall, with grand staircase, of a decrepit palace.  Intermittently, an imposing empire-style crystal chandelier appears.  The first scene appears to be set in some sort of institution, and the children clearly appear to be orphans, displaced or refugee (or any combination of the three).  Dress is modern, post-WWII, though not contemporary.  

Hermann, Tomsky and friends are not visibly soldiers.  There were flickers of lightning outwith the storm in the first scene that made me wonder if, perhaps, it wasn't lightning but artillery fire, and that maybe we were in the siege of Leningrad, but there were other elements that seemed to place the action rather later.  The female guests in the ball scene were all blondes in little black dresses, while the ball wasn't a ball but a fashion parade.  To summarise, I simply couldn't see what director Vera Nemirova was trying to say.  

As has been the case in other non-traditional productions of The Queen of Spades that I've seen, the best of it comes in the second half, with a very effective confrontation between Hermann and the Countess (living and dead), and gambling hall conclusion.  Whatever Nemirova had in mind for the earlier scenes became unimportant, these scenes played out without any particular directorial interference, and the change of period was simply window dressing.  

Olga Borodina (The Countess) and Dmitry Golovnin (Hermann) 
The Queen of Spades, Act 2.ii 
(© Vienna State Opera, January 2022)

Vocally, the performance was fairly solid.  Dmitry Golovnin was a strong Hermann, suitably deranged, with rather goulish make-up whose raison d'être became apparent in the second half.  Elena Guseva was a fairly dark-toned Lisa, a little mature-sounding for my liking, but earnest and passionate.  Alexey Markov was an excellent Tomsky, jovial and expressive, delivering a splendidly atmospheric Legend in the first act, but Boris Pinkhasovich was only a respectable Yeletsky, not particularly compelling.  Olga Borodina, on the other hand, was superb.  This Countess was not a fragile old lady ready to drop dead from fright, anything but, however, the clue to her fate rested in the start of her scene, when she says she's tired of it all.  Hermann appears to her as irreal as she appears to him later, he's her Angel of Death, and that is what she gives in to, voluntarily going towards him on that basis.  Her voice still retains much of what made her one of the leading mezzos of her generation, and the nuances of her reading were excellent, with a beautiful, subtle gleam on the tone as she reminisces of all the French aristocracy she rubbed shoulders with in her glory days.

It would all have been a great deal more satisfactory had Valery Gergiev been on better form.  He's become very much a hit-and-miss conductor; on good days, he's electrifying, but tonight, that galvanising quality was not there.  Although the orchestra played well, it never really achieved the kind of effects, and the depth of expression that truly bring this score to life.  The last Queen of Spades I saw, the broadcast from the Royal Opera House three years ago, was an object lesson in what a fine orchestra under an inspired conductor can achieve; this never really touched those depths.  Worse still, there was a lot of imprecision in the choral work, and the sound wasn't as Russian as it could have been.  The chorus of gamblers at the start of the last scene began very scrappily indeed, and although the basses made themselves heard, that final, brief, heart-breaking prayer simply didn't have the right sound to it.  A passable evening, but not quite at the top level.

[Next : 5th February]