The Gambler.

The Gambler, by Sergei Prokofiev, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Opera is widely considered to be akin to a tortoise: a thick-hided entity, impervious to change, and moving slowly if at all. The operatic repertory in 1950 featured the ABCs: Aida, Boheme, and Carmen. The repertory in 2001 features the same three. Every year opera companies throughout the United States produce the same thirty or so operas, with now and then a novelty; the most consistent novelty is restricted to the advertising gimmickry used by the swollen marketing departments to sell the ABCs. (A few years ago, the admittedly avant-garde Houston Grand Opera's season brochure was devoted to the dogs of photographer-artist William Wegman in costume. What the divas said about this was not recorded.)

But, as Galileo once opined, "E pur si muove." Opera, in its tortoise way, does indeed more, and the last decade or two bas seen several surprising changes. One of these is in the area of Slavic opera. At the middle of the last century "Russian opera" consisted of one, perhaps two, Tchaikovsky operas (Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades), Boris Godunov, maybe Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel (both, incidentally, operas introduced to the West by Diaghilev), and a Czech contribution, Smetana's Bartered Bride. A few others fitfully appeared to disappear.

Today, that landscape has dramatically changed. If Rimsky-Korsakov remains on the outside and Mussorgsky continues strong (with Khovanshchina as well), the twentieth-century masters Shostakovich and Prokofiev have come to center stage and the operas of Dvorak and--more importantly--Leos Janacek are now if not ubiquitous at least frequently encountered. (New York will hear two productions of The Makropulos Case this season.) In part, this change is owing to the industry of two conductors, the Janacek specialist Sir Charles Mackerras and the Russian Valery Gergiev.

There is little doubt that the prime force behind the performance in the West of Russian opera has been Gergiev, the dynamo who heads St. Petersburg's Kirov Opera. Gergiev the conductor-impresario came seemingly out of nowhere, and his immense energy has transformed a once respectable but dusty company into an operatic force, overshadowing the more famous Bolshoi Opera of Moscow. In so doing, he has attracted Western monies and sponsorships, and the company has become the magnet for all young Russian singers who want careers in the West. His multitude of recordings with the Kirov have spotlighted the Russian repertory.

Gergiev is reputed to have invented the thirty-hour day with his workaholic habits, the range of his interests, and his apparent ability to be in three places at once. He is also, it should be noted, a first-rate opera conductor, with an emphasis more on fieriness and propulsion than on reflection. As Principal Guest Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, Gergiev bas complemented James Levine in a repertory that Levine largely shuns, while bringing to the Met (both for its seasons and as a visitor with the Kirov Opera) a range of Russian opera largely unknown here.

One of the areas of fruitful exploration is the operas of Sergei Prokofiev. Until quite recently, few people knew anything about Prokofiev's vocal works, for a variety of reasons. His ballets, for a start, were much more popular--it was regularly said that Prokofiev was a ballet, not an opera, composer. Several of the operatic works he wrote, including The Gambler, were deemed unsuitable for the Communist state and banned from performance, while his patriotic opera Semyon Kotko was considered, outside the Soviet Union, agitprop. His immense, uneven and troubled setting of Tolstoy's War and Peace had its vicissitudes, with the very size of the undertaking daunting opera companies. Prokofiev may have written eight or nine operas, but the only ones known thirty years ago were The Love of Three Oranges, which had its debut in ...