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Royal Opera House, London
In Russia The Tsar's Bride is part of the standard repertoire, but in the west it has suffered the same neglect as nearly all the rest of Rimsky-Korsakov's operas; this new production is the first to appear at Covent Garden. It's a qualified success – handsomely presented and more than competently sung, but unable to paper over the flaws in the work itself.
The story is set in the 16th century – the tsar of the title is Ivan the Terrible – and in Paul Curran's production that regime of tyranny and violence, potions and poisons, updates convincingly to present-day Moscow's world of the super-rich. Kevin Knight's vividly rendered sets include a lap-dancing restaurant and a penthouse swimming pool. The oprichniki, the tsar's secret police, become a bunch of gun-toting heavies, while the tsar himself, who doesn't appear in the opera, is presumably away watching one of his football teams. It's a cogent reworking, but can't do much to iron out the convolutions in the plot. There are some fine numbers, including an authentic mad scene for Marfa, the bride herself, and the music does take charge for the grand-guignol ending, but otherwise too much of Rimsky's folksy score seems anonymous and pallid.
Mark Elder does what he can to inject intensity, and even though Marina Poplavskaya gives one of her typically glacial performance as Marfa, the rest of the predominantly Russian cast is top class. Johan Reuter is Grigory Gryaznoy, whose obsessive love for Marfa engineers her death, and Dmitry Popov her hapless fiance, Likov; Ekaterina Gubanova is a suitably scenery-chewing Lyubasha, Gryaznoy's abandoned mistress, and Paata Burchuladze is wonderfully secure as Marfa's father, Sobakin. Worth catching, then, if never overwhelming.
