Customer Reviews

Rimsky-Korsakov: May Night

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As a big fan of Rimsky Korsakov's operas (I have at least one audio recording of all of his operas and am collecting the DVDs as they slowly come along), I was looking forward to this production of May Night. I was disappointed. The recorded sound is poor (distant) and the production itself - sets and costumes - is quite odd.

For me, decoding the action required a libretto with stage directions and fortunately a complete libretto came with the 1994 Saison Russe recording.

We have been fortunate to have some of Rimsky's operas show up in good to excellent DVD productions: Le Coq d'Or, Sadko, Mlada, Tsar's Bride. Even the quirky and drastically cut Tsar Saltan of Harry Kupfer is wonderful in comparison to this newest entry. Let's hope a good Kitezh or Snow Maiden comes along at some point.

I was familiar with this charming, tuneful folk-style opera, rarely produced outside of Russia, thanks to my old LP set on DG, & looked forward to finally "seeing" it. But most of what I saw on this DVD was bewildering: a giant ladder upstage for no apparent reason in Act 1; doors & rooms referred to in the text that were nowhere to be seen; cagelike bars dominating the set in Act 3, again for no apparent reason; physical actions the characters sang about but didn't do. All very confusing, & I had to consult the stage directions in the LP set's libretto to remind myself about what was happening.

The costumes added to the confusion, unrelated to the time specified (the Mayor refers to having personally served Catherine the Great) or to any other time, for that matter. The costumes spanned the gamut from the 18th century to the present, suggesting that instead of having new costumes created for this production (other thsn the gauze wraps of the Rusalki chorus), the director simply raided the company's warehouse of costumes from other productions to oufit the cast.

Another serious flaw on this DVD is the artificial,over-reverberant sound, the fault no doubt of an over-enthusiastic studio engineer trying to "enhance" the acoustic ambience.

All that said, the music is first-rate Rimsky-Korsakov, the singing & orchestral playing excellent. The musicians deserved better.

This opera has pretty good singing and that's pretty much all. The sets and cosumes are just Eurotrash and the opera itself has little plot and even less interest. The music is Rimsky Korsakov at his most mechanical and even the orchestration disappoints --- which is unusual for this composer. Unless you enjoy watching a group of stupid drunks stumble around and hit one another, it is simply not worth watching.