The Snow Maiden Opera. This is a 25 foot tall Rooster welcoming in the Chinese New Year. It flapped its wings
It was a truly nutcase “Snow Maiden” at the Mariinsky last night, Rimsky-Korsakov’s operatic masterpiece of returning spring, reimagined via copius amounts of LSD in a surreal world of fairy tale meets Sacre Du Printemps via liberal helpings of marijuana. What were the set designers on? Shades of Chinese New Year as well as our heroine eventually melts and the sun is free to shine and usher in a very late spring. Madcap, but fun.
A very large cat sits on someone’s roof, while people with cottage heads sit around.
A double headed jade Pig makes an appearance. It’s not in the original story.
The Snow Maiden melts and the sun can come out again. Hoorah!
Natalia Yevstafieva as Lel, Olga Pudova as the Snow Maiden, conducted by Boris Gruzin.
The Snow Maiden is one of my favourite operas, and the composers too – Rimsky-Korsakov wrote sixteen, and all with perhaps a couple of exceptions being wonderful observations from classic Russian fairy tales. He was a traveller too, and collected folk songs from all over the Russian Empire, leading to a lot of his works possessing oriental motifs, which is one reason he is possibly my favorite composer -it’s a close run thing with him and Tchaikovsky.
The orchestral suite extracted from the opera can be heard here.