Seattle Takes Risk and Wins With Soviet Opera Selection

As host city to the 1990 Goodwill Arts Festival this month, Seattle has been toasting the cultural benefits of glasnost . Not every event offered by this international arts festival paralleling the Goodwill Games athletic competition is Soviet, but performances, exhibits, and films from the Soviet Union have dominated the arts schedule. With this Soviet emphasis, the Seattle festival invites comparisons with San Diego’s Soviet arts festival held last fall.

Not surprisingly, each festival presented an epic Russian opera as its primary artistic icon. San Diego Opera took the safe route, mounting a production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” to American audiences the most familiar Russian-language opera. As San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell planned, the colorful production that mingled a Soviet conductor and several Soviet singers with a largely American cast was a box office smash, although the critical reception was somewhat less ecstatic.

Seattle Opera, however, gambled with a far riskier choice, Prokofiev’s “War and Peace.”

“I wanted the opera to be the major event in the arts festival,” explained Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins, who admitted he considered doing “Boris Godunov” but rejected it for a more unusual work.

“I knew I could get Russian support to do ‘War and Peace’--you must remember that this was back in 1987 at the beginning of the thaw--because Prokofiev’s opera is very favorable to the Soviet Union as a people.”

“War and Peace,” arguably the quintessential Soviet opera, was composed during World War II, although the composer never saw a complete production of the work. For his libretto, he used events from Tolstoy’s novel, notably Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and retreat from Moscow, which served as a thinly disguised symbol for Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union and eventual defeat by the Soviet armies under Stalin’s leadership.

Seattle Opera’s production of “War and Peace,” which opened July 22, is only the second production of the massive opera in this country. In 1971, the Boston Opera staged the first one. The four-hour pageant has nearly 60 roles--some of which are sung by the same singers--in addition to a large chorus and corps de ballet. Like San Diego’s “Boris,” this “War and Peace” featured a Soviet conductor and several guest Soviet singers.

“I knew that up to this point, only Sarah Caldwell (Boston Opera’s general director) had done the opera. When I went to the Soviet Union, they didn’t think it would happen in Seattle.”

The easiest way to compare San Diego’s “Boris” to the Seattle Opera’s “War and Peace” is to note that Alexander Morozov, the Kirov Opera bass who sang San Diego’s title role, was given a secondary role in Seattle. As Dolohkov in “War and Peace,” Morozov made an ingratiating, swashbuckling military officer and sang the part with greater ease than he did his rather stiff Boris here.

Baritone Vladimir Chernov, who sang the romantic lead Prince Andrei, was clearly the star of the Seattle production, although there was ample competition for the accolade. The hot young singer, also from Leningrad’s Kirov company, sang with ringing authority and gracefully inhabited Seattle’s vast stage.

“When I visited the Kirov in 1988 to audition singers, they threw out the red carpet,” said Jenkins. “I was delighted to discover Chernov and sign him up, although at the time he was not that important to Kirov.”

When asked if he compared notes with Campbell as he put his cast together, Jenkins replied, “I helped him. You see, I had all my singers before San Diego went looking.”

Seattle Opera started planning its $2-million “War and Peace” production three years before the curtain went up, whereas Campbell and his company had little more that 18 months from the time San Diego mayor Maureen O’Connor announced her intention to hold the Soviet arts festival until San Diego’s “Boris” inaugurated the local festival. And while San Diego Opera received a subsidy of $421,000--the total budget was just under $1 million--from the festival producers to mount “Boris,” Jenkins received no money at all from the Goodwill Arts Festival, although it did buy the opening night of the six-performance run.

Seattle Opera’s opening night performance brought the house to its feet even before the final orchestral cadences sounded, and Seattle critics doled out generous praise in the following day’s newspapers. Although Jenkins would like to capitalize on the success of “War and Peace” with another Soviet opera in the near future, he has nothing on the drawing boards.

“But I do hope this will encourage people to come to our fall production of Dvorak’s ‘Rusalka,’ a little-known Slavic opera which has a beautiful score.”

“Rusalka” may be little known in Seattle, but on this count, San Diego opera buffs can point out with some satisfaction that the American professional premiere of Dvorak’s opera was produced here in 1975 by former San Diego Opera general director Tito Capobianco.

Benefit Forum. Stephen Sondheim’s musical comedy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” may be light years away from Prokofiev’s uplifting “War and Peace,” but the current La Jolla Playhouse production of “Forum” will drape itself in noble robes Monday night.

The company will present a benefit performance in UC San Diego’s Mandell Weiss Center at 8 p.m., with proceeds going to the San Diego AIDS Project, the county’s largest nonprofit AIDS social service agency.

Musical director Ted Sperling, who adapted Sondheim’s score for the La Jolla production, explained his commitment to the benefit.

“In New York, where I do most of my work, we’ve done quite a few benefits like this because we have been directely affected by this epidemic. I want to stress that the idea came from members of the company, who are donating their services,” said Sperling.

The La Jolla production of the early Sondheim classic (1962) has received highly favorable reviews from the local critics. Sperling rates the work as one of his favorites among the Sondheim canon.

“Recently, I have done a spate of very heavy shows, so it has been fun to do a show where music is funny and not intended to carry too much weight. It’s one of those musicals in the old tradition of the American stage.”