Bringing ‘Godunov’ to Davies
When Michael Tilson Thomas met with director James Darrah to lay plans for their San Francisco Symphony staging of Mussorgsky’s epic 1869 opera “Boris Godunov,” Thomas talked about his favorite film, “Andrei Rublev,” Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 masterpiece about the turbulent life and times of the great 15th century Russian painter of icons.
Among other things, the movie explores “how much the society is permeated by levels of oppression and suspicion,” as the maestro puts it. The film’s stark black-and-white imagery and penetrating portrayal of the spectrum of Russian society inform the
“semi-staged” production of “Boris” — a sweeping opera about the turn-of-the-17thcentury czar and his tumultuous, treacherous world — playing at Davies Hall on Thursday, June 14; Friday, June 15; and Sunday, June 17.
Watching the movie after meeting with Thomas, Darrah, who directed earlier Thomas-conceived productions of “Peer Gynt,” “Peter Grimes” and “On the Town,” was keyed into Tarkovsky’s way of telling a story in which “something important or horrifying is happening out of the frame somewhere, while the main characters are in a scene here,” Darrah says. “And you’re watching somebody get picked up by the police and carted off. To me, that’s the world of ‘Boris.’ There’s all this overlap of intent and action.”
Darrah is in Berkeley, where the theater’s wardrobe crew is sewing the “Boris” costumes designed by Emily Anne MacDonald and husband Cameron Jaye Mock. Veterans of past Thomas semi-staged events, they also designed the sculptural set that curves behind the orchestra and holds the screen — a kind of disintegrating skin draped on the bones of a domed building — onto which projection designer Adam Larsen will beam inky, abstracted images alluding to things Russian.
“We didn’t have much interest in doing Russian postcard imagery,” says Darrah, whose team approached the work keenly aware of “how these pieces live differently in a concert hall than they do on the opera stage. There’s a full orchestra onstage. The Symphony is the main character. You can’t design and stage the piece as you would in an opera house, so you find other ways to activate it, whether it’s through video or the design.”
In addition to the soloists, among them Stanislav Trofimov — the Russian bass making his Symphony debut as the potentate haunted by the ghost of the young czar-apparent Dmitri, whom he allegedly had murdered — the big cast includes three actor-dancers. Up in the terrace, the Symphony Chorus plays a big role as the cowed, manipulated populace that later becomes a rabid mob.
“The chorus is going to be dressed in earth tones, these grays and blues, to really show the sorrow and distress,” says MacDonald, who likens the piece to “Andrei Rublev” in its “mood and feel. Both have this full view of life in Russia, embodying a diverse cast of characters — peasants, religious people, royals. What links them is this overarching sorrow and unrest.”
She and Mock sought a look that was “timeless and universal, but honest to the cultural heart of the piece, which is very Russian. We wanted to have a contemporary feel with historical details, little details that bring you back.” She’s dressing the old monk Pimen in a black cassock that could have been worn in the 16th century or nowadays at a Moscow demonstration, where you might see “people in traditional religious garb alongside Pussy Riot.”
The saturated quality of MacDonald’s pen sketches, and subtle use of red and gold, went into what projection designer Larsen calls “an aesthetic of ink — bleeding ink, or ink obscuring or revealing things. There’s location, and emotional and psychological
qualities the projections have to communicate. Ink will help meld it all together.”
Thomas, who pared the opera to just under two hours, is using Mussorgsky’s original 1869 orchestration, whose fresh harmonic language particularly influenced Debussy. The score is “full of startling and original things,” says Thomas, who ends this “Boris” with the Kromy forest scene Mussorgsky added in his 1872 version.
The opera, he adds, “is very powerful, deep, expressive, tragic, tender, all those things. It’s an amazing psychological portrait. What makes the piece so striking is the grandeur, and the huge melancholy of it.”
Unlike some contemporary “Boris” productions, this one doesn’t try to suggest Putin’s Russia. The story speaks for itself.
“It’s about a period of political disunity, in which all sorts of people are grasping for power,” Thomas says. “The good people are, by and large, ineffectual, and there are various levels of bad people who are trying to pull dirty tricks on each other, do these desperate things, but have plausible deniability.
“Then they get trapped by conscience and grief and guilt, and it does them all in. That’s not something we see much in contemporary society.”