The Golden Cockerel, like so many of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas, features dazzling orchestration, passages of superb writing for the female voice, and a fairy-tale atmosphere with political undercurrents. Although it is marginally less of a rarity outside Russia than some of his other works, it remains largely neglected in the West, and the opportunity to see it performed as part of this summer’s Santa Fe Opera season was most welcome. While Paul Curran’s visually striking but dramatically uneven production obscured some of the story’s more intriguing possibilities, a stunning performance from Venera Gimadieva as the Queen of Shemakha offered ample proof of Rimsky-Korsakov’s mastery of the operatic fable.
The story, adapted from Pushkin by Vladimir Belsky, takes place in a far-off land which is under threat from an even further-off land.…
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