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A tsar is born
Boris Goudenow rules
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

It might not be a rediscovery on the order of finding Aeschylus’s lost Oedipus trilogy or Shakespeare’s missing Love’s Labour’s Won, but the Boston Early Music Festival’s retrieval and reconstruction of Hamburg composer Johann Mattheson’s never-performed 1710 opera Boris Goudenow is a living, breathing example of a form that too often over the ensuing 295 years has been DOA at the opera house, overstuffed in sets and costumes and avoirdupois, inert in performance, and overpriced at the box office. Boris does everything an opera should: it sings (vocalists and orchestra members), it acts, it dances. It’s not popular entertainment on the order of U2 or Star Wars, but it’s hugely entertaining. No surprise that after the four concerts here in town last week it’s going on to Tanglewood this weekend (June 24 and 25) and then Moscow and St. Petersburg. One wonders whether London, Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, and Milan won’t also be calling.

Readers of a certain age will remember Boris Badenov as the villain from The Bullwinkle Show. His prototype, Boris Godunov, ruled Russia from 1598 until his death in 1605. (If you want to pronounce his name the Russian rather than the Rocky way, it’s Bah-REES Gah-doo-NOFF.) Boris’s reign, well-intentioned but ill-starred, never recovered from the belief (probably untrue) that he’d murdered the heir who stood in his way, the epileptic Dmitri, back in 1591; False Dmitris started popping up like toadstools. Modest Mussorgsky’s troubled 1869–1874 opera depicts Boris as a Macbeth figure whose guilt does him in. (In for a kopeck, in for a ruble: it’s Mah-DYEST MOO-sorsky.) There’s no mention of Dmitri in Mattheson’s opera; his Boris is a nobleman trying to maneuver past rival claimants to the throne while assorted romantic intrigues play out around him. Mattheson himself had left the Hamburg Opera in 1705, after a duel with Handel, and it seems he didn’t even offer Boris Goudenow for production there. The opera has two subtitles, "The Throne Gained Through Cunning" and "The Happy Union of Duty and Love"; Peter the Great, then building St. Petersburg, might have taken offense at the first. The manuscript barely escaped the World War II bombing of Hamburg; it wound up in Armenia and wasn’t returned until 1998 — whereupon it came to the attention of BEMF directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs.

More As You Like It than Macbeth, Mattheson’s macaronic Boris (some arias in German, some in Italian) is no lightweight. His hero is a born politician who on the death of Tsar Theodorus retires to a monastery and waits for the (hired?) citizens of Moscow to offer him the crown. Foreign prince Josennah (based on Duke Johann of Denmark) also eyes the throne and will woo both Russian princess Olga and Boris’s daughter Axinia to achieve it. Foreign prince Gavust (based on Prince Gustav of Sweden) loves Axinia, and he regards Josennah as a usurper and an interloper. Russian prince Ivan dotes on Olga; Russian prince Fedro is equally besotted with Boris’s sister Irina, the problem being that she’s already married to Theodorus and isn’t about to sacrifice duty for love. And there’s the de rigueur comic servant, Bogda, who who’ll sacrifice anything for sleep. Move Mattheson ahead 175 years and he’s Gilbert and Sullivan rolled into one.

It’s not about the plot, of course. We don’t know why Josennah’s ambition should be less legitimate than anyone else’s, or how Olga’s "influence" could bring him (and her) to the throne, or why it should fall to Axinia to prevent this "coup." We do know that, when the newly crowned Boris orders heaping handfuls of coins to be minted and distributed to the public, he won’t be appointing Alan Greenspan as his economic adviser. Anna Watkins’s costuming for the BEMF production nonetheless locates the political divide between Old Russia, with its robes and cloaks and tall fur hats, and Modern/European Russia, with its wigs and plumed hats and frock coats and breeches. For all Boris’s Machiavellian manipulating, he’ll be lost to history, an interregnum between Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Yet the BEMF production should ensure that he lives in Mattheson’s opera as much as in Mussorgsky’s. Taking as their model a theater pit in the Czech Republic, O’Dette and Stubbs arranged the 32-piece orchestra around what looks like a long narrow table with tiny reading lamps, giving the Majestic audience the impression it had been invited to a dinner party with a lavish entertainment. Everywhere there’s the ebb and flow of human life: the BEMF Orchestra, led by a bobbing and weaving but never obtrusive Robert Mealy, making Baroque music for the 21st century; David Cockayne’s set design alternating public (the tsar’s throne room; Boris’s cloister retreat; the Kremlin at sunset) and private (intimate scenes in front of the orange proscenium curtain); Lenore Doxsee’s lighting signaling emotional shifts (warming outside the icy monastery as Irina warms to Fedro); Lucy Graham’s choreography giving voice to what words can’t express.

Russian bass Vadim Kravets is an anchoring Boris, his voice oak-like in its authority, his almost baby face deceptive in its determination while leaving you to wonder whether the new tsar is ready for life beyond opera. Tenor Aaron Sheehan and soprano Nell Snaidas are well-matched as Ivan and Olga: he’s tall and rangy and moves like the Prince Ivan of Russian folklore and she’s his Firebird, feathery and flirtatious and never still. Their voices match too, both forgoing power for inflection. Tenor Colin Balzer and soprano Catherine Webster are a sedate Gavust and Axinia, he a stout bewigged European gentleman, she sweet but not very demonstrative until at the end she steals a kiss. He has some poignant cadences in his phrasing and also an intriguing moment when after Ivan has wounded Josennah he steps in as if he’d been the hero, Europe taking credit for Russia’s deed. Polish bass-baritone Marek Rzepka is the birch tree to Kravets’s oak, his Fedro fidelity in bloom and almost over-articulate in his asides to the audience; he’s a little oddly sorted with BEMF veteran soprano Ellen Hargis, whose Irina seems all duty and no love, though her palpable dismay at leaving court for the cloister shows what she can do when she chooses to.

Canadian bass-baritone Olivier Laquerre’s magisterial Theodorus is a weary Old Testament patriarch commending his life to the God who created him; tenor Julian Podger’s arch Josennah recalls Colin’s Firth’s Lord Wessex in Shakespeare in Love but transcends cardboard villainhood in his tender arias to the crown and then to Axinia. As the opera’s counter-anchor, local tenor William Hite’s Bogda sniffs his armpits, wrinkles his nose, and farts whenever he can’t help it, which is often. The precursor to Mozart’s suffering-but-smart servants, and Goldoni’s, and so many more, he whips a monk’s robe out of his duffel bag at the mere mention of easy life in the monastery, though once there he can’t keep the children from turning him into a human Maypole and crowning him king of the chamberpots. The choruses (including the PALS Children’s Chorus) sing well but the princes and the noblemen could benefit from a more royal carriage.

Opera began as the happy marriage of singing, dancing, and acting; then it got two left feet, and when it stopped dancing, it stopped acting as well. The half-dozen dancers headed by balletmistress Melinda Sullivan contribute a duet for guards with halberds, a sly passepied in which the attendants of Gavust, Axinia, and Josennah spoof their masters, a grave sarabande in memory of Theodorus, and a hymeneal chaconne "for Cupids and Pleasures" plus the riotous Act II monastery suite for children and codgers. More than that, though, they keep this Boris on its toes; it’s as if the dancing were infectious. When everybody moves, the result is moving.

Boris Goudenow | Tanglewood, Tanglewood Theatre, 297 West St, Lenox | June 24-25 at 7 pm | $36-$71 | 617.266.1200 or bso.org


Issue Date: June 24 - 30, 2005
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