French director Arnaud Bernard approached Rural Honor with his own mold, sending the ardent Sicilians from their sultry home island to New York a century ago. Despite the change in time and place, passion in action did not diminish, but physiology became much more than the author of the opera had assumed.
In “Rural Honor”, we recall, Pietro Mascagni told a simple story about how a certain villager was jealous of her husband for his former passion and told the bitter truth to the husband of a lover. He killed the guy who gave him horns. Actually, that’s the whole plot. But it is customary to love this work not because of the primitive synopsis, but for the very beautiful music and laconism – a one-act performance lasts 70 minutes. Nothing compared to the five-hour Wagner who squeezes all the juices out of the performers and listeners.
Arnaud Bernard has not been invited to a production at the Mariinsky for the first time. In 2019, he released Puccini’s Girl from the West here, and Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers two years earlier. Apparently, that experience seemed unfinished to the director, and he placed Rural Honor in exactly the same scenery as Vespers. Why not – the mafia is immortal and on the New York soil of the 1920s takes root in the moment. In addition, there is an obvious saving in the dry budget of the Mariinsky Theater – it is necessary to release premieres, but the situation with fees against the background of the 25% occupancy limits that have reached St. Petersburg, the situation is clearly not simple. So the Mariinsky Theater can only be praised for the concept of “minimum means – maximum expressiveness” and for resourcefulness.
The fact that the new “Rural Honor” will be hotter than usual becomes clear already in the first mise-en-scene, when the loving Lola (Ekaterina Sergeeva) squeezes the equally passionate protagonist Turidda performed by Yusif Eyvazov with her openly bared hips. These races will be continued later by the cuckold and husband of Lola Alfio (Roman Burdenko). However, he at least indulged in healthy lust with an unknown whore from the gateway, dispensing with the cynical trampling of the newlywed bonds. The unhappy and unloved bride, Turiddu Santuzza, does not get any female happiness at all – and Ekaterina Semenchuk simply opened up on the stage an abyss of despair, wild jealousy and violent anger interspersed with sporadic manifestations of remorse. Yes, this rarely happens in life, but a theater is a theater, and there are absolutely no complaints about the performers. And the clarification of the relationship between Turiddu and Santuzzi could be heard over and over again – the voices of Eyvazov and Semenchuk merged so harmoniously.
Bernard loves to decorate his performances with elaborate interiors and costumes detailing even for minor characters. The result is a real film-making – in the best sense of the word. Children, priests, mothers of families, hooligans, mafiosi who shed blood in a naturalistic way – everything is written out, drawn, made up and sewn with a bang. In such conditions, it was a sin both for the choir and the orchestra under the direction of Valery Gergiev to blur the big picture. But everything worked out: the musicians sounded excellent, the choir performed as befits the collective of an academic theater.
The intrigue of the premiere evening was the performance in the main male role of Yusif Eyvazov. Seeing him in the role of Turiddu was all the more curious because of the news that this part was originally prepared by completely different performers. But the circumstances favor the admirers of the Mariinsky Theater: against the background of total quarantine restrictions in Europe and the United States, the starfall on the St. Petersburg stage does not stop. And Eyvazov has long become a star – he is no longer the character who found himself in the media field after a star marriage with Anna Netrebko. And in “Rural Honor” he delighted fans not only with captivating sound, but also with a temperamental dramatic game. A special response from the audience received his bowing out when Eyvazov, with tired satisfaction, patted himself on a torn T-shirt soaked in fake blood.
Of course, Netrebko could not miss the premiere with her husband’s participation: she listened to his voice, being in the VIP box of the New Stage of the Mariinsky Theater. The end of the performance was marked with a charming vignette in the modern COVID-style: a few lucky ones had the opportunity to face the opera diva literally face to face. Netrebko in a luxurious kimono dress proceeded to the elevator. When the cabin doors opened, the descendants were at first taken aback, then gasped and applauded in unison. But at the same time, they did not yield to the star and did not even make room to allow her to use the elevator. They also showed some rural honor. Or maybe they just decided to maintain a social distance.
The next premiere screenings of Rural Honor are scheduled for December 4, 5 and 13.
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