Russian opera filmed for Western audience

Press, 4 February 1987, Page 14

Russian opera filmed for Western audience

By HELEN WOMACK NZPA-Reuter Moscow

A British company is investing substantial sums in the filming of a classic Russian opera at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, in the hope that it will catch on with Western television viewers. The National Video Corporation (N.V.C.) has picked Modest Mussorgsky’s historical opera, “Boris Godunov,” said the production director, Robin Scott, because it is a “deeply Russian" classic, better known in the West than any other. Based on a play by the nineteenth century poet, Alexander Pushkin, the tragic opera tells how Boris, a councillor of Ivan the Terrible, wins the Russian crown by murder and intrigue but sub-

sequently dies, consumed by guilt and remorse.

Mr Scott said that N.V.C. would video the opera, using the latest technology, and aimed to bring the 39-year-old production to the livingrooms of Western television audiences. The film will be offered to television companies and cable networks all over the world, and video shops will also be able to sell it direct to viewers. The famous pastelyellow Bolshoi Theatre is now closed, as Mr Scott and his 20 production staff film the opera with the help of the Soviet State broadcasting company, Gosteleradio.

Mr Scott hopes for a good return, for N.V.C. has invested £250,000 in the venture.

He is also working on a video of the more recent production by the Bolshoi Theatre of the' ballet, “The Golden Age,” with music by the twentieth century composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, and choreography by Yuri Grigorovich.

His company, founded in 1980 to specialise in the video filming of opera and ballet, has already recorded 60 productions at such prestigious houses as London’s Covent Garr den and Milan’s La Scala. N.V.C. has worked before in the Soviet Union, but never on such an ambitious project as “Boris Godunov.”

The production, now with Yevgeny Nesterenko as the murderer Tsar Boris and the famous tenor Vladimir Atlantov as the pretender Dmitri, was first staged in 1948.

The Bolshoi has recently been criticised in the official press for sitting on its laurels and turning out tired old operas with increasingly ageing stars, sometimes cast in the roles of young heroes and heroines.

Opera, in general, seems to be lagging be-

hind the theatre and cinema in the innovative and inspiring work, for which the Kremlin leader, Mr Gorbachev, has called, while ballet is dominated by a few top choreographers such as Grigorovich.

But Mr Scott said he felt “Boris Godunov” deserved to be seen by a wider Western audience than the few opera lovers who attend the relatively rare touring performances of Soviet companies.

“It has stood up very well to the test of time,” he said. The video producers sought no change to the theatre production. . Special lighting techniques were being used to show off the “rather creaky but very pretty” original scenery to the best effect, he said. “The scenery for the coronation (of Boris) is still spectacular,” he said.

Mr Scott said that in the long term his company

would be looking to record new operas and ballets in the Soviet Union. “We could film one or two a year if the Russians were producing new material,” he said.