The Russian film and theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov, an outspoken campaigner of liberal causes, is not yet widely known here. He draws headlines in Europe. His work demands attention. Provocation may get the better of sense, but his seriousness acts as a fixing agent. At this year’s Edinburgh international festival, where opera is high on the agenda, Serebrennikov will make his UK directorial debut with his Komische Oper Berlin production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, conducted by James Gaffigan. It is sure to be a noisy talking point (16-18 August).
Some context: Serebrennikov, 54, ran Moscow’s Gogol Centre, an interdisciplinary arts forum founded by him, until he was charged with embezzlement in 2017. While tagged and under house arrest, he directed Così fan tutte (for the Zurich Opera, later seen at the Komische) via video calls. He has said Mozart, at that difficult time, saved his sanity. Finally released and cleared after much international condemnation of his case, Serebrennikov left Russia in 2022 and now lives in Germany.
This new Figaro, part of the Da Ponte trilogy he is directing at the Komische Oper, is exciting and outrageous. Some will condemn Serebrennikov for playing fast and loose with one of the untouchables of the canon. His credo is to revise, revisit, in his eyes make relevant. The style is horror-thriller, with sexual perversion and a massacre along the way. Characters are added, omitted, doubled. The stage is a flurry of activity, even when you want stillness. Arias are reordered. Music is imported from, in one case, Così, in another, the slow introduction to Mozart’s string quartet K465, “Dissonance”.
The Count and Countess are super-elite collectors of modern art. They live in a Herzog and de Meuron-style white space. Marcellina (Karolina Gumos) has been elevated from old crone to elegant, trouser-suited curator. All the multimillion-dollar art-world names are referenced freely in the director’s own designs: Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, Claire Fontaine, Bruce Nauman. Rich and poor, upstairs and downstairs, are more important than the class issues central to Mozart’s original. As with Serebrennikov’s Così, the stage is split horizontally. Downstairs is a chaos of washing machines, shopping trolleys, household cleaning items, men stripping off (in order to get their kit into the next laundry cycle). Throughout, instant messaging on a big screen and slogans add to the layers of optical distraction.
Musically the performance is secure but not yet exceptional. Orchestral playing is spot on but, woodwinds aside, could be more characterful. Or perhaps, with so much happening on stage, I paid less attention than usual. The finest singing comes from Susanna (Penny Sofroniadou), the pivot of the action, full of nervy, icy disdain for her employers; and from her somewhat overshadowed but powerfully voiced fiance, Figaro (Tommaso Barea). The rest of the ensemble – including Hubert Zapiór (Count) and Nadja Mchantaf (Countess) – rise to the challenges of Serebrennikov’s restless staging.
Most striking is the doubling of Cherubino. He is played by actor Georgy Kudrenko as a deaf and mute gymnast-dancer, his arias sung by the invented figure of Cherubina (Susan Zarrabi). The stunning Kudrenko is a Serebrennikov regular (he was the postman in the director’s 2022 film, Tchaikovsky’s Wife). He throws himself across the stage like an erotically charged teenager, and dives from the window naked. He prepared for the role with an international sign language coach to perfect his signing. His wordless grunts may have to be rethought for UK audiences, who are unlikely to tolerate a pretence at disability. In fact they may not tolerate any of this Figaro, at all. Try it. Have your preconceptions rattled. The powdered wig stagings will always be there. There’s room in the world for both.
Never underestimate the skill needed to frame the irregular, to make elegant that which is incomprehensible while keeping anarchy intact. The Linbury theatre’s double bill of two Dada-esque chamber operas has done just that, aided by a visual armoury of hanged man, guillotine, bridal bouquets, a legion of teddy bears and a lot of pink. All praise to directors Eleanor Burke and Harriet Taylor, and designer Anna Reid and their team. The cast was drawn from the ROH’s Jette Parker artists programme, which offers career development to rising professionals of exceptional talent.
Explaining the plots will not help. Here, nevertheless, is a flavour: in Bohuslav Martinů’s Larmes de couteau (1928), a mother tries to marry her daughter off to Satan, but she prefers a corpse. John Harbison’s Full Moon in March (1977), taken from WB Yeats, follows the Turandot tradition of a virginal queen who murders her suitors if they won’t sing a song. Martinů’s score, played with stylish vigour by the Britten Sinfonia – in the pit throughout, under the youthful baton of Edward Reeve – is eclectic and droll, jazzily splashed with accordion, banjo and alto saxophone. The Harbison, dominated by a sinewy tick-and-clack of prepared piano, as well as sonorous marimba, gives a glimpse at the work of a prolific American composer, now in his mid-80s.
Each tiny opera gives these performers a chance to act and sing gregariously, without waylaying them with naturalistic emotion. The singers, Valentina Puskás, Veena Akama-Makia, Edmund Danon and Jonah Halton, excelled in both shows, demonstrating versatility and huge potential. They were joined by dancer Liam John Hill and boxer Aisha Weise-Forbes. I can think of several operas that would benefit from the inclusion of a boxer. Let it become a trend.
Star ratings (out of five)
Le nozze di Figaro ★★★★
Larmes de couteau/Full Moon in March ★★★★
Le nozze di Figaro is at the Schillertheater, Berlin, until 26 May, and at the Festival theatre, Edinburgh, 16-18 August
Larmes de couteau/Full Moon in March are at the Linbury theatre, London, until 4 May
