SALZBURG – Offbeat operas have been some of the Salzburg Festival’s best in recent years, the latest a colorful, outlandish and entertaining staging of Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Gambler” by director Peter Sellars.
Starring soprano Asmik Grigorian as Polina and tenor Sean Panikkar as Alexei, the 125-minute work was met with enthusiastic applause when it opened Monday night in the Felsenreitschule, the theater built into the Mönchsberg mountain known for its appearance in the 1965 film “The Sound of Music.”
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Seven large roulette wheels/chandeliers rise and fall, each looking a bit like a pinball bumper or the Jupiter 2 from “Lost in Space.” The Felsenreitschule is covered with green moss and its archways filled with mirrors, mostly broken, in George Tsypin’s set design.
“You get these thrilling sounds because the mountain is just exploding with sonic energy,” Sellars said.
James F. Ingalls, the lighting designer, used Astera PlutoFresnel lamps to illuminate the action without cables, creating rich reds, greens, purples and yellows in what Sellars termed the style of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese.
“It’s something I needed to get used to,” Grigorian explained. “I said, `Peter, I think with every single rehearsal, I’m getting more and more blind.′ The lights are really very strong, but in a few days you are getting used to it.”
Grigorian’s outfit, by costume designer Camille Assaf, made the message clear. Playing the stepdaughter of the debt-ridden General, she wears jeans and a burnt orange and black T-shirt that reads: “PATH CHOSEN — ALL OR NOTHING.”
“The gambler is like an emblematic figure of our time,” festival artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser said. “We are surrounded by gamblers. They’re playing with us. They’re playing with our existence, with our world, with the climate. They’re playing with cryptos and bitcoins.”
Scenes morph into each other instead of ending.
Panikkar commands the stage as tutor for the children of the debt-ridden General and would-be lover of Polina. An American from Pennsylvania, his sometimes imprecise diction during early rehearsals sparked laughter from Grigorian, a Lithuanian.
“It suddenly became some bad words in Russian,” she said.
Even when Panikkar's pronunciation sharpened, memories of early rehearsals prompted cackles as opening night approached.
“When I’m staring into her eyes in this dramatic moment and I say this, it just made her crack up,” Panikkar recalled.
Among Sellars’ updates to the libretto, adapted by Prokofiev from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel, is changing “telegram” to “email” in the on-stage English titles.
In a story set in the mythical German resort town Roulettenberg, Polina is in debt to the Marquis, apparently her former lover. She is in Sellars’ view an activist who persuades Alexei to splash orange paint on the sports jacket of Baron Wurmerhelm (bass Ilia Kazakov) as a climate-change protest. The General, here a corrupt government contractor, awaits the death of wealthy grandmother (mezzo-soprano Violeta Urmana), who arrives at the casino and loses big. Alexei wins enough to pay off Paulina’s debt only for her to reject him and return to Mr. Astley, an English venture capitalist who is another former lover. The opera ends with Alexei collapsing and exclaiming: “Red came up 20 times in a row!”
“I have family members that dealt with gambling addiction, not necessarily in a casino environment but more on the day-trading side of things,” Panikkar said. ”I have family members that are alcoholics. Everybody has somebody that they can relate to that struggles with various addictions.”
Sellars wrote his undergraduate thesis at Harvard on Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was to direct the premiere in 1917 at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater before it was postponed due to the Bolshevik Revolution. Meyerhold was executed in 1940 during the Great Terror, but cleared of wrongdoing 15 years later. The opera didn’t premiere until 1929 at Brussels’ La Monnaie and received its Russian premiere at Moscow’s Bolshoi in 1974 — 21 years after Prokofiev’s death.
“Economics were censored. The politics were censored. The erotic element was censored,” Sellars said. “It was presented as a really Soviet opera made out of steel, like a warship, but not very sensual, not alive with all these colors, not the wild Soviet avant-garde of collage.”
There are five additional performances through Aug. 28, and a stream will be available on Medici.tv starting Aug. 24.
Hinterhäuser also programmed well-received productions of Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Greek Passion” last summer and of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s “The Idiot,” also based on a Dostoyevsky novel, this season.
Russia is being highlighted. Timur Zangiev conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in his festival debut in “The Gambler” and Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of the former Soviet Communist party head Nikita Khrushchev and a U.S.-based professor, gave the festival’s keynote speech on July 26. Teodor Currentzis, criticized by some for alleged funding ties to the Russian establishment, is conducting a revival of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”
While condemning Russia’s government and invasion of Ukraine, Khrushcheva argued against cultural cancellation.
“Since 2 1/2 years I have this situation where I have to explain why I don’t ban every Russian artist and every outfit from the festival,” Hinterhäuser said. “It’s impossible for me. This is something which didn’t exist a few years ago, these kind of pressures. It’s also due to the social media now, which are very powerful.”