San Francisco Classical Voice

With its current production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride, the San Francisco Opera makes a welcome and thoroughly worthwhile excursion outside of the standard repertory. You could hardly ask for a better cast than the one led Thursday by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Olga Borodina, and Anna Netrebko. As a leading advocate of late-Romantic Russian repertory on disc, Neeme Järvi would also seem an ideal choice as conductor, though even at this second performance the orchestra sounded a little underrehearsed in parts (starting with the somewhat ragged textures at the center of the overture).

By the time he composed The Tsar's Bride in 1898, Rimsky was an old hand at opera, having produced no fewer than eight, some of them revised one or more times. The well-paced, theatrically effective design of the opera, to Rimsky's own libretto, is evidence of this practical experience. Bride harks back to his first, The Maid of Pskov, whose libretto was likewise based on a historical drama by L. A. Mey embroidering details in the private and public life of Ivan the Terrible. Shedding the fantastical, exotic-orientalist manner that had become something of a specialty in the meantime, The Tsar's Bride turned to a style at once more sober and more lyrical. The brooding melodic introspection of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin seems to have left its mark on many passages of the score.

All the principals are given sizeable arias, one or more apiece, and many of the ensembles and folk-styled choruses are structured in a consciously "old-fashioned" manner for a work of this date. The drug-and-violence-induced mad scene of Marfa, the unwilling bride of the title, harks back to Lucia and friends of the bel canto era, underscored in this production by the bright spotlighting of the character in her white robes and disheveled tresses against a darkened stage.

Elsewhere we do get hints of the chromatic-harmonic experimentation and sensuous scoring for which Rimsky is famed — for example, at the opening of Act 4, where a mysterious chord sequence seems to suggest the workings of the slow-acting poison that has been switched for the love-potion Gryaznoi intended administering to Marfa. Extensive use of the ubiquitous "Slava!" hymn tune (as found in the Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov, among many other examples) gives a familiar ring to other parts of the score. The hymn is treated as a leitmotiv for Tsar Ivan, a pantomime role limited to a few glowering walk-ons. (Lotfi Mansouri's direction gives Ivan more stage time than the libretto specifies — for example, during the prelude to Act 3, where we see him judging a kind of Tsarist beauty pageant, described later in the act, in which he chooses among finalists for the role of his Tsarina.)

Mey's drama, in Rimsky's adaptation, involves the complicated network of amorous inclinations — requited and unrequited — typical of so many earlier opera plots. Tsar Ivan, of course, is no benevolent despot of the Metastasian type, however, and the quasi-historical cast, setting, and customs give the familiar plot ingredients the local color on which all of Rimsky's operas thrive.

The central figure is Grigory Gryaznoy (Dmitri Hvorostovsky), a member of the much-feared Oprichniki, part Cossacks and part secret police charged with upholding the Tsar's absolute power. Gryaznoy's mistress, Lyubasha (Olga Borodina), was among the spoils of some earlier pillaging, but she has grown to love him as a devoted wife. He, on the other hand, has tired of her and is fixated on winning the beautiful Marfa (Anna Netrebko). Marfa , in turn, is happily betrothed to a childhood sweetheart, the young merchant Lykov.

Naturally, it is Marfa who wins the dubious honor of being selected to become the Tsar's bride, just on the point of celebrating her nuptials with the fair young Lykov. But in the meantime, both Gryaznoy and Lyubasha have been separately intent on slipping Marfa a potion, each one procured from the alchemist-doctor Bomelius: Gryaznoy's is a love-potion meant to attract Marfa to himself; Lyubasha's is a kind of "unlove" potion that will waste away her charms so that Gryaznoy will cease to desire her. Lyubasha surreptitiously replaces the love-potion with her own. But any way you look at it, Marfa's unhappy fate is sealed by the start of Act 4.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky no longer cuts quite the dashing figure he did at the start of his career, either vocally or physically. His Don Giovanni here last spring was something of a disappointment. But, although in his solo scene at the opening of The Tsar's Bride he was unable to project consistently over the orchestra, his Gryaznoy was on the whole just right — with enough swagger and charisma to make Lyubasha's tragic attachment plausible while also conveying the seamier side of this self-absorbed Oprichnik grappling with a sort of midlife crisis.

Considerably more impressive vocally was Olga Borodina's Lyubasha, with her mesmerizing rendition of the largely unaccompanied ballad-lament in the first act. Her darkly beseeching tones perfectly matched the situation of her duet with the callous Gryaznoy at the end of this act, the first of several passages steeped in the idiom of Onegin. Equally impressive was another lamenting aria toward the end of Act 2, concluding with an exquisite, sustained diminuendo. (Following her next, brief scene, in which she submits to the terms of Bomelius' bargain for the potion she seeks, the boisterous Oprichniki oblige with a rousing Hopak-like chorus to bring down the curtain.)

Fittingly, it is the much-admired Marfa who gets the one real star turn, vocally and dramatically, even if this comes at the moment of her demise. Anna Netrebko milked this Act 4 "mad scene" for all it was worth, with soaring and elegantly drawn lines. It's a toss-up as to which — Netrebko or Borodina — offered the finer performance. Both were riveting.

Bass Kevin Langan, as Sobakin, Marfa's father, was a strong presence in both of the last two acts. His aria beginning Act 4, where Sobakin frets over his daughter's mysterious turn for the worse just as she has been selected to become Tsarina, is a prime piece of Russian basso repertory. Langan gave an impressive rendition of the number, with its final long, held low F.

Jay Hunter Morris brought an appropriately light, ingratiating tone to the tenor role of Lykov, Marfa's originally intended bridegroom, though sometimes a bit frayed around the edges (as in his Act 3 aria, "The clouds have passed"). The "character" roles of Saburova (mother of Marfa's friend Dunyasha) and the doctor, Bomelius, were nicely handled by Irina Bogacheva and Nikolai Gassiev. Adler fellow Elena Bocharova was attractive in the light mezzo role of Dunyasha, and Vladimir Ognovenko dispatched the role of the older Oprichnik, Malyuta , with plenty of bluster and bravado.

The set designs (Zack Brown) and costumes from the original Washington Opera production faithfully reproduced each detail of Rimsky's stage directions and might even have been modeled on original designs. The torchlit and candlelit wooden dwelling of Gryaznoy in the first act, the autumnal village scene of Act 2 (passing gradually from late afternoon to nightfall), and later the elaborately painted vaulting of Ivan's palace, in rich red and ochre tones, all had great visual appeal. With an opera as little familiar as The Tsar's Bride there is no reason to complain about such a literalist approach, since audiences are all the less likely to benefit from any flights of high-concept directorial interpretation.

The chorus has many opportunities to shine (especially the men), as you'd expect in the Russian repertoire. Under Ian Robertson's direction, the San Francisco Opera Chorus came through with energetic and incisive performances throughout the evening. Neeme Järvi managed to convey an idiomatic understanding of the score's Russian inflections, though I could have wished for a tauter sense of drama much of the time, not to mention (again) ensemble playing. Individually, though, brass and winds realized the colors of Rimsky's score effectively.

If this wasn't the perfect Bride in every respect, it still had a great deal to recommend it. And when it comes to out-of-the-way repertory of this sort, we can't afford to be as particular as Tsar Ivan. (What did it get him, after all?)

(Thomas Grey is Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is author of Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, and editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Opera Handbook on The Flying Dutchman as well as the Cambridge Companion to Wagner.)

©2000 Thomas Grey, all rights reserved