Mavra/Iolante by stage director Axel Ranisch is a creative combination of Igor Stravinsky’s one-act opera Mavra and Tschaikovsky’s one-act opera Iolanta. Recorded in 2019 at the Cuvilliés Theatre Munich. Mavra is a comedy about a clever and aggressive girl who blunders into losing her lover. Iolanta is a bittersweet story of a princess who finds love even though she was sheltered from life by the king and grew up ignorant that she was blind. The star singers are graduate students in the Opernstudio der Bayerischen Staatsoper. Alevtina Ioffe conducts the Chorus and Children’s Chorus of der Bayerischen Staatsoper (Chorus Master Stellario Fagone) and the Bayerisches Staatsorchester. Set, costume, and video designs by Falko Herold; lighting by Michael Bauer. Sung in Russian. Directed for TV by Corentin Leconte. Released 2022, disc has 5.1 dts-MA Master Audio sound. Grade: NA
Mavra has been performed rarely and has been recorded only a few times in CD collections of Russian music. Iolante is fairly well known—we have 2 HDVDs of it in our Alphalist. The two operas were written to vastly different styles of music.
But this is not a double bill. It’s a mash-up with director Ranisch combining sweet and sour in a single new opera. Scenes from the two works are interwoven to create something new. And both operas are performed complete! The charm will be to see how well Ranisch bakes his cake from such different ingredients. Well, Tim Ashley throws the cake in the garbage in his January Gramophone review (page 103). Tim says “jolting between scores does neither work any favors” and that the combination doesn’t “add up to a satisfactory whole.” But Steven Jude Tietjen at pages 60-61 of the July 2023 Opera News approves. He says the merger of the two operas “heightens the themes of isolation, loneliness, escapism and yearning for liberation that boil beneath the surfaces of both works.” Seems to me that this title is a good bet for the adventurous opera fan.
I usually put anything recorded by students on my excluded list. But after seeing the trailer below (probably the best trailer I’ve seen in 15 years of working on this website), I decided to cover this. Watch the trailer!
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