Rimsky-Korsakov - The Golden Cockerel DVD

The Guardian 60

Popov/Garifullina/Fellauer/Loginova/Mariinsky Opera/Gergiev
(Mariinsky)

Valery Gergiev’s Philips recordings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s stage works, with the singers and orchestra of the Kirov Opera (as the Mariinsky in St Petersburg was still called then), remains one of the landmark operatic achievements of the 1990s. Gergiev had recorded only five of Rimsky’s 16 operas when the series was halted; the most significant of the works he did not get around to were The Snow Maiden, May Night and the last and perhaps most forward-looking opera of all, The Golden Cockerel. But three years ago he conducted a new staging of the latter at the Mariinsky, directed by Anna Matison, and to some extent this DVD of that production fills the gap.

Not entirely, though. Today’s Gergiev is not the same hugely inspirational figure he was in the 1990s, when his performances of the Russian repertory in general and Rimsky in particular were so compelling. This version of The Golden Cockerel is never less than well played, and it’s occasionally very beautiful, but there’s none of the sense of crusading zeal and energy that coursed through Gergiev’s accounts of operas such as Sadko and The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh two decades earlier. What seems blunted, too, is the brittle, political edge to the work, the satire on Russian imperialism that led to the score being banned as soon as it was completed in 1907; the premiere did not take place until two years later in Moscow, by which time Rimsky had died.