In its 30th, jubilee, season, the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera turned its attention to the works of Charles Gounod for the first time. In his modern and expressive version of the classic opera Faust, director Yuri Alexandrov deals with the philosophical issues of being, man’s vocation, and the confrontation between heaven and hell, responding vividly and passionately to today's world events.
As Alexandrov said about his production, "Over the past decades we have witnessed a lot of attempts to zombify people. Many world regimes have tried to subdue the human mind and soul. This happened during the period of Communism, and, to some extent, it is also happening now. Just look at today’s information wars. People around the world are brainwashed in various ways. The invasion into human consciousness, the attempt to create a new Frankenstein -- that's what I see in the story of Faust. Obviously, this topic is very urgent and very important for me, so we will analyse it scrupulously. Gounod composed great music, and we took care of it. Although we did change the sequence of scenes in our production, this does not mean that we have cut anything from it. In my version, we emphasize all of the characters’ personal experiences. However, we are not trying to impose new personal qualities on the characters; we stick to the original ones."
General cast
- Conductor
- Maxim Valkov
- Faust
- Sergey Aleschenko / Vsevolod Kalmykov
- Méphistophélès
- Yuri Borschev
- Marguerite
- Tatiana Kalchenko
- Wagner
- Anton Morozov
- Valentin
- Egor Chubakov
- Siébel / Cleopatra
- Larisa Pominova
- Marthe / Lais
- Natalia Vorobyeva
- Featuring
- St. Petersburg Chamber Opera's Orchestra and Chorus
Credits
- Libretto after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Part I
- Michel Carré / Jules Barbier
- Director
- Yuri Alexandrov
- Set and costume designer
- Vyacheslav Okunev
- Lighting designer
- Irina Vtornikova
- Voice coach
- Yana Zubova
- Chorus director
- Igor Pototskiy
- Choreographer
- Nadezhda Kalinina
- Video designer
- Daniil Bakalin
- Premiere
- May 27, 2017