While stuffed trumpets stutter the first fanfares into the room, figures hooded in winter fish body parts out of the ice holes of the Neva - and are not even surprised.
Saint Petersburg in winter.
“The Nose”, Dmitri Shostakovich's ingenious youthful prank, not as a revue-joking satire, but as a macabre, realistic tragedy.
Kirill Serebrennikow knows what he's staging.
Physically, the Russian director, who is banned from traveling, is far away on the night of the premiere of the Bavarian State Opera.
But what he worked out in three weeks of rehearsal in Moscow with the main actors, and later with Zoom and many assistants from afar, still reaches us directly.
He himself is a man without a nose, without an identity, without a passport.
An autobiographical evening, to be sure, but not a self-pitying one.
Serebrennikov shows people in cages whose noses are literally cut off by the judiciary;
it shows Putin's ideologically frozen Russia between barriers and armored cars, brutally stopped demos and tourist folklore, senseless political interviews, frozen democracy and religious kitsch.
There are many noses as identities and privileges here, they grimace the faces of the huge ensemble of singers.
A programmatic start
Anyone who loses their nose, like the central examiner Kowaljow, whom Boris Pinkhasovich sings with the most beautiful baritone, suddenly looks completely normal - and automatically becomes an outsider.
Serebrennikow staged, as always, hyper-realistic and parabolic at the same time.
That is his trademark, his closeness to Kafka, his search for truth.
He gives the Bavarian State Opera a strong start to a new era.
It was the first premiere of Serge Dorny's directorship, but not her actual beginning. A “September Festival” attracted many visitors for the first time to the temple of the National Theater and the baroque jewelery box of François de Cuvilliés: short formats of one hour, moderate prices up to 25 euros, three events a day, open doors, the fountain courtyard of the residence as a piazza for encounters and participatory - all of this was not only wrested from Corona requirements, but also a programmatic start, a signature. In contrast to his predecessor Klaus Bachler, Serge Dorny seeks communication.
He mingles with the people, at the premiere he is not enthroned in the proscenium box for everyone to see, but sits in the lowest tier, where it sounds better anyway. He does not switch to the New York Metropolitan Opera or London's Covent Garden, but works specifically with other Munich theaters. His new festival »Ja, Mai« in spring 2022 not only juxtaposes Monteverdi and Georg Friedrich Haas, it also involves actors from the Münchener Kammerspiele and some of it takes place in the Volkstheater.
The Bavarian State Opera is by no means provincial, on the contrary: Teodor Currentzis and Romeo Castellucci are responsible for one of the three cleverly designed evenings, Titus Engel and Claus Guth for another.
Christoph Marthaler, whom Bachler - not very happy - entrusted with Aribert Reimann's "Lear", comes back for Lehár's "Giuditta".