Two Big Russian Operas, on a Vivid Smaller Scale

St. Petersburg is home to one of the world’s great companies, the Kirov, which has risen to special glory in the past decade under the conductor Valery Gergiev. It absorbs the best young singers and instrumentalists that the country can produce and has a monopoly on the city’s (and country’s) operatic fame these days.

So it can hardly be a surprise that the St. Petersburg Opera would be little-known outside its home city. It is a chamber company formed 13 years ago, and from its productions of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” which it brought to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts over the weekend, it appears to be exactly what St. Petersburg needs. It proves that the Kirov has, in fact, no monopoly on outstanding young Russian singers (although it might on instrumentalists).

And it offers the kind of dedicated approach to opera as theater that no large assembly-line opera company anywhere, however good, provides except on rare occasions. Indeed, St. Petersburg Opera is the kind of company every opera city needs.

Under any circumstances, “Onegin” and “Boris” make a fascinating pair. Both operas are taken from Pushkin, and they view the decay in Russian society from opposing angles. Onegin is the quintessential 19th century rich, jaded, bored aristocrat who takes nothing seriously and whose tragedy is to learn too late that life is to be lived. Boris is the quintessential potentate undone by political corruption.

For these productions, staged by company founder and paterfamilias Yuri Alexandrov, “Onegin” is treated as a family drama presented in the style of Chekhov; “Boris” as a folk drama. The company has little chorus to speak of (the company members all join in), an orchestra of but 40 and, for each opera, a modest unit set. “Onegin” takes place in an arbor, in seven fluid scenes rather than three formal acts. “Boris,” which is presented in Mussorgsky’s original version, without the Polish scene, is staged without its usual grandeur and around a dilapidated wooden hut (with a golden extension for Boris) and is often quite brutal.

Some of Alexandrov’s ideas are good ones, some not. He inspires an exceptional performance, for instance, from Olga Kovaleva, whose transformation from plain young girl to remarkable grown woman in “Onegin” is arresting.

However, in trying to focus the entire opera around Tatyana, he sends her wandering around the stage all too often in her nightdress, looking like a distraught dancer who got lost on her way out of a Martha Graham ballet.

In “Boris,” Edem Umerov is a deeply depressed ruler who, at his coronation, looks like an unshaven Nixon at his most glum and hounded, and who goes down from there. One never gets a sense of the czar’s greatness, but maybe that’s the point in a country that has had no easy time of it under some of its recent leaders.

Or maybe it was that Umerov, who does not have a particularly powerful voice, was simply tired. This company makes the hyperactive Kirov look like slackers. I saw the Saturday evening performance; Umerov had also sung Boris at the matinee that day. Kovaleva, the Tatyana Friday night, was Xenia, Boris’ daughter, on Saturday.

But what is not to be denied is the sense of the theatrical commitment. Every moment in both operas was staged to mean something; everyone on stage was an individual.

And even an ordinary singer, such as Dimitry Taneev, the Onegin, managed surprisingly well to convey the essential qualities of an arrogant aristocrat on the decline.

Meanwhile, a special singer, Elena Eremeeva, who was Tatyana’s nurse in “Onegin” and the innkeeper in “Boris,” could be, in these surroundings, utterly spellbinding. A superb actress with a rich, lusty and highly flexible mezzo-soprano, she made the tavern scene in “Boris,” in which she is raped by the traveling monk, a horrifyingly unforgettable instance of one of Alexandrov’s more shocking innovations. Seditious details like this--and there were many in both productions--emphasized just how much St. Petersburg Opera is a people’s opera, not just in its necessary avoidance of the trappings of operatic glamour but in its focus on the undercurrent of human suffering in these dramas.

There are plenty of shortcomings. Several singers can be assigned different roles in each opera, which surely enhances the overall theatrical quality of any presentation, but which also means that the audience will never be sure what it will get at any given performance. I was glad, for instance, not to have had the bass Alexandr Toradze (Gremin in “Onegin” and Pimen in “Boris”) in the more important roles (although he does sing them in some performances).

Nor does the orchestra--thin, ill-tuned, poorly balanced--provide the company with the same credibility its singing does. The same conductor, Vadim Afanasiev, who is the company’s music director, was listed for both performances, although two different men were on the podium.

But both conductors, whoever they were, knew their business and how to achieve theatrical urgency, which is exactly what this highly individual company is all about.