FROM AROUND THE WORLD: ST. PETERSBURG.(Review)

"Sometimes it seems that Kitezh was not written by Rimsky-Korsakov but appeared anonymously as a divine message," says the director Dmitry Chernyakov in the program book of the Mariinsky Theater's new production of The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, underscoring the opera's spirituality. Part history, part fairy tale, part mystery play, Kitezh is in some respects a grand summation of nineteenth-century Russian opera, yet it is quite unlike any other opera. It is most often compared to Parsifal, not least because of its spacious pacing and contemplative scenes. But Rimsky's music keeps its distance from Wagner's chromaticism. And the plot is thoroughly Russian, with those familiar villains of Russian opera, the Tatars, rearing their heads in the thirteenth century to menace the sister cities of Kitezh. They decimate Lesser Kitezh, but in answer to the prayers of the forest maiden Fevroniya, recently betrothed to Prince Vsevolod, Greater Kitezh is transformed into an invisible paradise whose inhabitants enjoy eternal bliss.

As with a compelling performance of Parsifal one can hang on every word of the opera, something facilitated for the foreigner at the Mariinsky Theater by its new policy of projecting English titles for Russian operas. But Valery Gergiev did his part too, setting spacious, unhurried tempos but ensuring that the music always had pulse. In the mid-1990s the Kirov staged Kitezh in two different productions, neither of which won much critical favor, though one ...