Boris Godunov, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Nov 10 2010

I had high hopes for Stephen Wadsworth’s production of Boris Godunov at the Met, seen in the encore performance of Nov. 10, based on his superb Ring for Seattle Opera. Unfortunately, reality fell short of expectations. The sets took the minimalist approach too far. For the coronation scene, we get a flat golden wall with a door. Yes, the golden wall appears to be made out of 1-foot by 3-foot golden plates with a bit of texture, but it’s pretty stark. Pimen and Grigory do without a monk’s cell; the only prop is a gigantic book, with pages about 6 feet square, on which Pimen is writing his history of Russia. Yes, he has to walk on and kneel on the book to write on it, using large characters which I take to be representative of 16th-century Cyrillic. (The book then winds up in every scene following, and people keep walking on it.) The inn at the Lithuanian frontier was a small wall flown in from above with a rude table in front of it, and lots of open space on the rest of the stage. Boris’s mad scene was done with a throne surrounded on four sides with steps up to the throne, rather similar to the stepped pyramid in San Francisco's recent production of Aida. The Polish scene was built around four very rectangular benches arranged in a square. The final three scenes (outside the cathedral with the Holy Fool, the boyars, and the Kromy Forest) featured little more than the large chorus. And of course, the book, which ends up in tatters.

The production could have been redeemed by a stellar performance, but the performance also failed to move me. Much advance notice was made of René Pape’s Boris, but I didn't get much out of it. The remainder of the principals were all Russians. The most impressive performance was given by Andrey Popov as the Holy Fool, notable not so much for the singing (Mussorgky doesn't give him particularly nice music to sing) as for his acting. Wadsworth gave him a significant (mute) role in the first scene. The camera followed him closely, and Popov deserved the attention. In the later scene outside the cathedral, where the children pester him, he wound up crawling into the omnipresent large book and wrapping one of the giant pages around him like a blanket—very effective. Mikhail Petrenko brought a superb bass voice to the role of Pimen, and Vladimir Ognovenko was an effective Varlaam. I didn’t feel that my 4½ hours in the theater had been wasted, but I didn’t get much out of it either. A gamma.