NOVAT’s main stage
The premiere of Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera “L’elisir d’amore” (“Love Potion”) opens the new 73rd season of NOVAT.
“L’elisir d’amore” (fortieth opera of a genius Italian composer, which he created at the age of 34) – is quite a modern story, though it was for the first time performed 185 years ago in Milano. In XXI century the director of the Novosibirsk opera presents this amusing and delicate story to the audience as an opera degustation.
“The repertoire of the Novosibirsk theatre needs a comic opera – for ten years there has been no performances in this genre – tells Vyacheslav Starodubtsev – this time we want to make it a synthesis of singing, dancing and drama, a mixture typical for American musical, blended with romance and humor of old Italian movie”.
Opera degustation is said to be a nice mélange of different styles and genres; it will also be full of surprises, for example all the patters are replaced by dialogues in Russian written by Vyacheslav Starodubtsev.
The Musical Director of the performance and the Principal Conductor of the theatre Dmitri Jurowski stressed that “the music of comic operas by Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti includes the basics of the new genre – operetta. The tunes of “L’elisir d’amore” hold the foretaste of Johann Strauss, Franz Lehár and other. This is why one should apply the lighter, operettish approach, but work hard on the details of musical matter. The specific features of our main stage made us add some changes, after that the performance became tighter and easier to comprehend. We had to replace patters with dialogues to keep the pace steady, otherwise the audience would lose interest for the stage action because the patters would just evanesce in this auditorium”.
The history of smitten guy Nemorino tricked by a con man Dulcamara about the magic powers of a plain wine has great contemporary importance: consuming society is more likely to believe the commercials praising some product’s magic powers. The directors approach defined the visual aspect of the show, which includes a lot of special light effects, neon ads and features of modern mass culture. The designer of the performance’s sets, lighting and video content is a top-ranked master of visual and lighting solutions Sergey Skornetsky. The costumes, authentic and innovative as always, are created by Zhanna Usachyova, irreplaceable co-author of Vyacheslav Starodubtsev’s opera performances – “Aida”, “The Queen of Spades. The Game”, “Un Ballo in Maschera”. “The name of this opera itself, its plot and music include some sort of fribble, which leaded us to adding a bit of sexuality and silliness into the costumes – told Zhanna Usachyova – I assume, the best way to depict all those things is to use American pin-up style, sprinkled with a dab of irony and grotesque”.
Love Potion / L’elisir d’amore. Music by Gaetano Donizetti. Libretto (Italian) by Felice Romani based on French libretto by Eugène Scribe, for Daniel Auber’s opera “Le Philtre”. Musical Director and Conductor – Dmitry Yurovsky. Artistic Concept and Chief Stage Director - Vyacheslav Starodubtsev. Set Designer, Lighting Designer, video content – Sergey Skornetsky. Costume Designer – Zhanna Usachyova. Stage Movement – Arthur Oshchepkov.
7,8 September 2017 Main Stage of NOVAT Beginning at 7 p.m.