stage
Artists
Credits
Authentic libretto: Carl Haffner and Richard Genée. Russian version: Nikolai Erdman, Mikhail Volpin.
Text is performed in both German and Russian.
Musical director and Conductor: Dmitri Jurowski
Stage director: Viacheslav Starodubtsev
Costume designer: Viacheslav Okunev
Video design: Vadim Dulenko Studio
Conductor: Evgenii Volynskii
Chief choirmaster: Viacheslav Podelskii
Choirmaster: Sergei Tenitilov
2 hours 25 minutes
one interval
“The Bat” is Strauss’s best piece in terms of operetta, and it is the perfect, the classic representative of a genre, where vivid festive emotions and romantic feelings are praised with captivating rhythms, lovely intrigues are untangled along with conflicts of married life. Music and plot are imbued with ingenuity, witty irony and subtle sense of humor, which capture the audience’s attention and set a festive mood.
“The Bat” is a kind of entertaining performance close to Italian opera buffa tradition. The music is full of bright colors, inexhaustible melodic ingenuity, imbued with Viennese waltz. “The Bat” is a kind of entertaining performance close to Italian opera buffa.
The story told by the composer and librettists describes ageless family problems life like love and jealousy, joy and disappointment. Naughty situations happening to main characters provide opportunity to assemble a fascinating narration. Errant Eisenstein is awaiting to fall in love with his wife again disguised as a beautiful stranger, and the charming Rosalinde is about to perceive new dimensions of female wisdom and charm to evoke old feelings and to save the family hearth.
This decision to pick the light genre masterpiece (which is not easy to perform at all!) is fresh, but not unexpected of the Novosibirsk opera. Score of “The Bat” is finely and thoroughly composed by a master of musical theatre, and it rightfully deserves to be shown at an opera theatre, which was done by a number of theatres around the world. This is why “The Bat” is “one of the most operatic operettas” in the world music literature: it has plenty of things to sing for the singers and a lot of interesting things to play for the orchestra. Conventionally it’s exactly this operetta that is a part of opera theatre repertoires, including most prestigious ones. The fact that it has been performed at the Vienna state opera for ages is no surprise, for the piece is genetically connected to the capital of Austria. However “The Bat” was staged many times in Metropolitan, Covent Garden and other biggest theatres of the world, while the outstanding singers like Ljuba Welitsch or Kiri Te Kanawa shaped the traditional image of the female part. Russian opera theatres turn to “The Bat” from time to time, for example nowadays it is included in the repertoire of theatres like Mikhailovsky in St.-Petersburg, Stanislavski theatre and Helikon Opera in Moscow. (Aleksandr Matusevich. Opera News. http://www.operanews.ru/09050301.html)