October 25, 2020 St. Petersburg State Institute of Cinema and Television
Press
Elena Konovalova
the Theatre. magazine
Director Dmitry Otyakovsky is staging opera. This is not his first production at the State Hermitage theater — a year ago, as part of the Opera in pictures project, he staged here Bastien und Bastienne by Mozart. Palace guards is the second work of this project.
The opera will be preceded by an interactive prologue that will introduce young viewers to the history of the Hermitage cats. And in the course of the story, they will also get acquainted with the halls of the Hermitage. The performance will be accompanied by a chamber orchestra, and projection sets and animation will help young viewers plunge into the world of fairy-tale opera.
Tatyana Yakovleva
Nezavisimaya gazeta
Dmitry Otyakovsky was distinguished by deliberate theatricality with the elements of the show: Rigoletto is not allowed to enter the club where Gilda is located, Mavra exists in the spirit of Malevich. In the final round Dmitry went all-in and offered a jury parody for the Nano-Opera project:
Love for Three Oranges turned into two rounds of the contest, with the king — Dmitry Bertman at the head of the table, with Princess — the leading broadcast of Sati Spivakova, and Smeraldina — one of the contestants Asya Chashchinskaya. As it should be, the comedy turned out to be really funny, at the same time it was dramatically structured and included the entire context of the event.
Svetlana Mazurova
Rossiyskaya gazeta
Feast during the plague is an international online project that is being created to support opera freelancers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author of the idea and stage director Dmitry Otyakovsky (St. Petersburg).
Screenlife is a movie format in which the action takes place using computers, phones, or other electronic devices. Characters communicate in messengers and Skype, search for the necessary information in the browser. At the same time, the viewer perceives both the characters and the story exclusively through the screens of their gadgets. Artists from Russia, Germany, France and Italy take part in this project.
Maria Nevidimova
the Musical life magazine
Opera films are not popular today. After the famous film frescoes of Franco Zeffirelli, the genre did not grow. Dreaming of reviving it, the young St. Petersburg opera filmmaker Dmitry Otyakovsky reinterpreted the film-opera in the screenlife format.
Rachmaninoff's one-act opera based on the plot of Pushkin's tragedy The Miserly Knight came to life in virtual space. Wide interest in the project was aroused by its name — Let's play opera. The literal let's play opera coincided with the essence of the let's play phenomenon: this is the name of a video from a computer game that is commented by its participants
John Pumphrey
Digitaler Fundus
1830 veröffentlichte der russische Dichter Alexander Puschkin zusammen mit drei weiteren kleinen Tragödien das Kurzdrama Das Gelage während der Pest, in dem er eine Szene aus John Wilsons The City of the Plague aufgreift. Darin feiert eine ausgelassene Gesellschaft — die Gefahr ignorierend und dem Tode spottend — im von der Pest heimgesuchten London ein makabres Fest.
Vertont wurde das Werk neben Sergej Prokofjew von dem litauischen Komponisten, Musikkritiker und Offizier César Cui. Angesichts der Aktualität des Werkes plant der russische Regisseur Dmitry Otyakovsky, die einaktige Oper ins Zentrum eines Onlineprojektes zu stellen, an dem auch John Pumphrey aus dem Opernensemble beteiligt ist. Auszüge daraus interpretiert unser Tenor gemeinsam mit Studienleiter Benjamin Schneider.
Brunello Vescovi
La Stampa
Anche il mondo della lirica soffre per le limitazioni imposte dal coronavirus: si cerca così di percorrere strade innovative, come la produzione di opere da diffondere in streaming. Fra i primi a cimentarsi il talentuoso regista russo Dmitry Otyakovsky, che ha affrontato l'allestimento di un testo del 1900 in un atto di César Cui, Una festa in tempo di peste, titolo quanto mai attuale.
E ha chiamato, fra gli interpreti, il soprano Elena Bakanova, russa di Magnitogorsk, che da anni vive ad Alessandria. Lo spettacolo di lirica da camera in screenlife sarà online sul canale YouTube dello stesso regista Otyakovsky, domani alle 20 (ora italiana).
