The Bolshoi Ballet has packed away its tutus and handed over the Coliseum to its operatic sibling. The five performances this week - three of Boris Godunov, and two (both on Saturday) of Prokofiev's The Love For Three Oranges - are the first the Bolshoi Opera has ever given in London.
It's become politically correct in Britain to perform the shortest of the assorted versions of Boris, the seven scenes of 1869 that were Mussorgsky's first attempt at compressing Pushkin's verse drama, and for them to be heard in the composer's own orchestration.
The Bolshoi performance takes over four hours; there are three 20-minute intervals and lengthy pauses between each scene, but there's still much more music than we've become accustomed to hearing here, though the version that they perform is a strange concoction.
It includes the scenes outside St Basil's Cathedral and in Kromy Forest, so that the Simpleton gets to sing his lament for the fate of Russia twice, but the Polish act, which Mussorgsky inserted to answer critics of his first effort who complained of the lack of substantial female roles, is played in a truncated form so that essentially only the love duet between the False Dmitri and Marina is retained; the character of the Jesuitical Rangoni is omitted altogether. Mark Ermler, the Bolshoi's music director, conducts the score in Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration, much smoother and more conventionally operatic than Mussorgsky's own, though the version of the St Basil scene is attributed to Ippolitov-Ivanov. This is Russ ian opera played and sung by a Russian company in a manner that fashion and epoch have scarcely touched in the last half-century. The Bolshoi production that has come to the Coliseum dates from 1948, and as might be expected from a show that was first seen when Stalin was still in power, it is strenuously realistic, telling the story without frills and creating its effects with meticulously painted cloths, sumptuous-looking costumes and some very dodgy wigs.
For better or worse this is museum opera, not so much living theatre as a stuffed and mounted exhibit, performed with very basic acting and a good deal of firm, loud singing, every word crystal clear. The best of the performances are very good indeed: there is a beautifully drawn Pimen from Alexander Kisselev, and though Vladimir Matorin's histrionic abilities are minimal, he delivers the title role with sustained dark tone and impeccable phrasing, even if it is dynamically unvaried. Elena Obraztsova's absurdly over-the-top Marina is a textbook example of operatic camp; her love duet with Vitali Taraschenko's False Dmitri becomes a competition for who can sing the louder.
It is a collector's item, then, worth seeing most of all for the endless curtain calls, which could teach British singers a thing or two about how to milk applause.
