The organisers of the Bucharest Opera Festival must have been holding their breath on Thursday night, when the festival’s fifth edition opened with a Russian opera, sung in Russian by the company from Chișinău, capital of neighbouring Moldova. It was less than a month since Russian drones partially destroyed an apartment block in the Romanian port city of Galați. Perhaps to smooth over any ruffled feathers, the national anthems of both Romania and Moldova were played before curtain up. In the event, the full house at the Bucharest National Opera responded warmly to a compelling new staging of Tchaikovsky’s last opera, and to a feast of fine Slavic singing.
The psychological set-up of Iolanta is hidden in plain sight. A blind princess, isolated from the world by her father, who gains self-awareness (and then sight) through the arrival of a mysterious foreigner. For blindness, read chastity, male dominance and female sexual awakening, but the director Slava Sambriș refrains from laying the symbolism on with a trowel in his sensitively updated production, first presented back in Chișinău in March. To this middle-class Englishman, his set for Iolanta’s flowery pavilion resembles a Home Counties garden centre. When the chorus milled around in the opening scenes, tending and watering, I half expected one of them to announce a two-for-one offer on delphiniums.
Iolanta often suffers cuts. Performing it complete, as here, underlines the mastery of Modest Tchaikovsky’s libretto. No wonder his brother was so delighted by it, and regarded Modest as a younger, albeit lazier version of himself. “You should have played some happier music,” says the handmaiden Laura after Iolanta withdraws into melancholy, and how Tchaikovsky must have enjoyed setting lines like that. The love duet arrives at the opera's golden section, and it was rapturously sustained here by Valentina Nafornița and Dumitru Mîțu.
The whole cast had youth on their side. The original play, adapted by Modest, has Iolanta turning 16, and after a diffident start, Nafornița unveiled a penetrating but sweetly modulated lyric soprano which swelled without pressure and soared easily over both the orchestra and her colleagues. Her male colleagues all had something special about them: an ursine stage presence, gruff charisma and muscular bass in the case of Alexei Botnarciuc as Iolanta’s over-protective father, King René. It was a shame that Vitaliy Machunsky throttled back for the top notes of his aria as the physician Ibn-Hakia, because otherwise he sang with cultivated phrasing that would make him an excellent Mozartian.
Meanwhile his colleague Andrey Zhilikhovsky, currently singing Almaviva in the Royal Opera Figaro revival, brought captivating energy and an old-school Italianate baritone to the role of Robert. More impressive still was Mîțu, as Vaudemont: no throttling back here, and no need to conserve resources, with a vocal instrument so appealingly open across the range. Nicely contrasted subsidiary roles included Victoria Istratuc giving the faithful servant Marta some authentically Slavic wobble and a splendid lower register.
Daddy knows best – even when he doesn’t. This is the story of Iolanta, told, and at times elegantly subverted, by the brothers Tchaikovsky. Artists from a former Soviet satellite state cannot help but bring their own history and experience to such a story. As the young, native music director of the company in Chișinău, Cristian Spătaru drew plangent colour from the woodwinds who lead Tchaikovsky’s striking orchestration. His pacing smoothly elided the passage between arias and scenes, arioso and recitative, underlining how Iolanta is a later work than The Queen of Spades – and by no means lesser.
Peter's trip to the Bucharest Opera Festival was funded by the Bucharest National Opera.
