Metropolitan Opera Archives

and "Khovanshchina" is a work that needs pacing. But it is also true that he makes very beautiful phrases, and much of "Khovanshchina," especially the choral music for the Old Believers, benefits from his kind of fierceness of love. The October 29 performance saw the Met debut of the Bulgarian mezzo Stefka Mineva as Marfa. Carefully controlled, regal rather than passionate, she held attention and sang effectively. One would like to hear her in Verdi, who was, I think, the influence on Mussorgsky in much of the music Marfa sings. The finest singing of the evening was by the baritone Allan Monk in Shaklovity's prayer for his native land. Aage Haugland was an absorbed and rather frightening Khovansky, though the voice was, perhaps deliberately, a little raw; the Czech bass Sergei Koptchak ("vice" Talvela, who had sung the early performances, I am informed quite well) was a sonorous priest; the Hungarian tenor Dénes Gulyás revealed a bright tenor voice as Andrei Khovansky.

August Everding's direction was not out of his top drawer, but moved crowds around effectively. One caveat: nobody, least of all me, knows why he wanted a trench that runs most of the width of the stage in outdoor scenes, giving people something to walk meaninglessly into and out of. Ming Cho Lee was working against the handicap of a very tight budget, much of which was chewed-up by the church-in-the-woods-on-the-turntable in which the Old Believers immolate themselves in the last scene. His St. Basil's Square was a textbook case on how much a brilliant designer can get from drops and lighting, but the scene in the Streltsy quarter was bare. John Conklin's costumes, his first-ever for the Met, were superbly rich where required, otherwise correctly and interestingly shabby.

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