Renard. Mavra

Renard is an “histoire burlesque chantée et joée”. Even by fairytale standards, the plot is banal (a vixen abducts a cockerel and other animals save him) and, in general, has little meaning: the voices of the four singers are not determined by the characters. Line by line and word by word, when compiling the libretto from Russian folk tales Stravinsky was interested, first and foremost, in the phonetics and the rhythm of the text. Today, this text reminds us most of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, while the tempo and energy of the musical presentation invokes rap.
Mavra is an opera based on Pushkin’s the Little House in Kolomna, a bridge between Russia and Europe: the score is indeed dedicated to the memory of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Glinka and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the three leading pro-western men in 19^th century Russian art. Voices from a past that is beautiful – with urban romances, gypsy songs and Italian opera in a Russian format – sound like listening to an old record. (Stravinsky had actually found the sliding musical intonations so typical of Mavra in gramophone recordings, still very imperfect in the 1920s.) One hears voices of St Petersburg’s Kolomna district where Stravinsky grew up: the church bells of the St Nicholas Naval Cathedral and the marches of the army brass bands that were based in New Holland. Bogdan Korolyok

Alyona Pikalova (Set Designer) and Sergey Rylko (Video Designer) are laureates of the Russia’s national Golden Mask theatre award (2022) for the best work of an artist in a musical theatre.