Dargomzhsky: Rusalka
Soloists
Moscow radio and TV orchestra and chorus
Valdimir Fedoseyev
Last year I included Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest as part of my 365 pieces projecthttps://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/07/dargomizhsky-stone-guest.html. That was a strange piece in which the composer set the text in something halfway between recitative and aria. It was worth listening to once just to hear what it was like but I didn't think that it really worked. This opera was much more conventional and is another example of the intermediate era between Glinka and The Five/Tchaikovsky.
I thought that it was a very uneven work. There were some quite gripping passages of ensemble, particularly in the later part of the opera, where the composer showed true dramatic flair. But parts of its were rather trivial and cliche-ridden and frankly, rather dull. There was no real sense of unity about the opera - one got the sense that all sorts of pieces from very different types of scores had been thrown together.
In the last act there is some very curious passages in which a young girl speaks lines over music - she is supposed to be the voice of the heroine who died many years earlier in the water. It is a most disconcerting effect on record - it seems to be part of a completely different piece - though I suppose that it might have been effective in the theatre. The whole episode is just really odd.
So after two really good operas (no 38 and 39) by middle generation Russian composers it was I suppose too much to expect a third. This was too uneven a work to have anything like the same impact as those two previous scores had. But then, the whole point of this project is to listen to as many different operas as possible and not all of them are going to be masterpieces.
No comments:
Post a Comment