OPERA REVIEW : The Mighty Bolshoi Strikes Out--Again

The Bolshoi Opera, once a mighty bastion of Soviet culture, resembled a provincial company embroiled in a hopeless artistic muddle when it opened its “Yevgeny Onegin” at the Metropolitan Opera House on Tuesday. Wednesday, the visitors from Moscow attempted a salvage operation with a mostly different cast.

The muddle lingered. It was depressing.

One could not blame any pall on the New York press. The negative reviews hadn’t come out yet.

The fault lay squarely with the Bolshoi administration, which had discarded an ancient but intrinsically valid production of “Onegin” in favor of a novel celebration of conservative ineptitude. The problems were aggravated, no doubt, by lightweight casting and lax music-making.

The company, reportedly numbering 450, had traveled a long way--with three military planes and a ship transporting 755,000 pounds of theatrical cargo--to prove that the West holds no monopoly on operatic mediocrity. Matters may improve drastically when Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Mlada” and Tchaikovsky’s “Maid of Orleans” enter the repertory here. But there is little in the new “Onegin” to justify the record-breaking top-ticket price of $135.

Actually, there would be nothing to justify that sort of expense were it not for Yevgeny Nesterenko, latest in a long line of fine Russian bassos, who vitalizes the opera late in the long evening with the 10-minutes alloted Prince Gremin. But even Nesterenko, the only holdover from the opening-night cast, encountered unexpected difficulties on Wednesday.

The enthusiastic New Yorkers were obviously impressed with the slow roll of his granitic tones in the first verse of Gremin’s great aria. They must have been touched by the introspective mezza-voce with which he ennobled the second verse. The boors were so moved, in fact, that they obliterated the final, crucial, descending phrase with outrageously premature applause, ruining a sensitively gauged performance in the process.

Nesterenko, incidentally, ended his odd New York stint on this sadly inaudible note. In his prime at 53, he is a busy man--head of the voice department at the Moscow Conservatory and in demand at major opera houses throughout the world. He left town Thursday morning to sing Verdi’s “Nabucco” in Verona.

His youthful colleagues on Wednesday all encountered problems. They weren’t the same problems that plagued the young singers at the opening, but they were serious problems nevertheless.

Pavel Chernikh, who happens to be a Nesterenko student, introduced a potentially imposing but still immature, rough-voiced Onegin. Maria Gavrilova--ignored in the house program but identified in press materials as an apprentice at the Bolshoi--mustered lovely soft tones and strident loud ones while she struck stock poses as Tatiana.

As the ill-fated Lensky, Arkady Mishenkin tried to float some poetic pianissimos and to ring some rousing fortissimos, but he lacked the technique to control either. Marina Shutova served as his pretty, raucously unsteady Olga. The secondary roles were pallidly cast, apart from Andrei Salnikov’s clumsy Monsieur Triquet.

Fuat Mansurov again conducted indulgently, and the Bolshoi orchestra again played roughly. The chorus sang lustily and stumbled through the so-called choreography eagerly.

On second viewing, the staging, attributed in absentia to Boris Prokovsky, and the sets, designed by Valery Levental, looked doubly awkward. The production seems to insist on contradicting the drama and getting in the way of the music.

The Larina mansion is framed by yard after yard of old-fashioned canvas foliage that drips quaintly from the proscenium. The unit-set stubbornly used in the first four scenes--false economy?--cramps the action hopelessly. The same sofa, centrally placed, materializes in Tatiana’s living room, in her country garden and, years later, in Gremin’s St. Petersburg palace. The furniture shortage in Russia during the 1830s must have been desperate.

A distracting, intrusive servant lowers huge curtains to create a rude but oh-so-theatrical blackout while Tatiana renounces Onegin in the not-so-grand finale. Luckily, one can’t get help like that any more.

Incidental intelligence:

* The piles of tell-tale loudspeakers that had flanked the stage on Tuesday disappeared by Wednesday. Still, the offstage choruses sounded as if they were being piped in from Chelyabinsk.

* Throughout the performances, security guards eye the audience warily from stools at the front of each aisle, just beneath the stage. So much for the carefree liberation of perestroika.