I was intrigued by Mazeppa when I heard a broadcast from the Met last winter, so I took advantage of the opportunity to go to the WNO performance at the Hippodrome in Bristol.
Why is a work of this quality not performed more often? Perhaps it is because audiences don’t expect Tchaikovsky to get this dark, though it’s a bit less surprising when you think of the 6th Symphony. One piece of light relief, the gopak in Act One, was cut in this performance. I wasn’t terribly lucky in the night I went as a couple of singers were clearly below par and showing signs of wear and tear as the evening went on. I found the lead soprano tended to overact in the earlier scenes (later on it didn’t matter). The Guardian‘s review is here.
There’s a striking resemblance between the end of the opera and that of The Rake’s Progress, and there’s a historical link too; Stravinsky’s father played Orlik in one of the first performances of Mazeppa.
The opera was re-set in Stalinist times; this mattered less by the end (17th-century rubble doesn’t look so very different from mid-20th century rubble). The staging did lose one thing: the arrival too late of Maria and her mother at the execution. We never saw them there, so it was unclear whether they’d tried to intervene.
On Thursday I was in London in that slack period after the Wigmore Hall and ENO shut for the summer and before the Proms start. This time the City of London Festival came to the rescue and provided an early evening concert of Pushkin settings given by Joan Rogers in St Giles Cripplegate. The accompanist was Christopher Glynn (stepping in at short notice) who came into his own later in the programme after the rather predictable accompaniments to the Glinka songs which opened it. The other composers performed were Rimsky-Korsakov, Medtner, Tchaikovsky, Rubenstein, and Mussorgsky (a pity we didn’t have any by Rachmaninov). We had some multiple settings of the same texts. The recital will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 one lunchtime early in August.