You had a premiere in Tashkent: “Ballo in Masquerade” at the Alisher Navoi Bolshoi Theatre. This is the theater of your childhood…
Alexander Titel: If you bring me to this theater with my eyes closed, I will recognize it by the smell: I spent my entire childhood there! The first theater of my life. And the first performance is “Doctor Aibolit”. Through an acquaintance they put me in the orchestra. But it ended badly: when a certain Barmalei surrounded the sleeping doctor, I screamed and ran away. My mother is a doctor and a man in a white coat is sacred.
How old were you?
Alexander Titel: About five years. But then I became a regular. In our ten-year-old music school at the Conservatory there was a children’s choir, I participated in performances, and the boys and I ran around the hot square of Seville in “Carmen”, singing lyrics, the wildness of which I appreciated much later. . But then I really liked everything. They began to participate in a children’s show: I carried a candle on “Rusalka” and participated in the triumphant return of the Egyptian army after the victory over the Ethiopians. I’ve also made my friends more interested: I can watch plays and earn a ruble. To go out among the crowd of Ethiopians in “Aida”, you had to smear yourself with stain, and we, unlike the choir, smeared ourselves with joy. It’s true that one day I had the nerve and said to the principal: “Don’t you think that such a pathetic Ethiopian army of eighth graders detracts from the Egyptians’ victory?”
There was a very strict firefighter there. I spent all the performances behind the scenes: they hid me in the prompter’s booth or in the box with the lighting equipment, and he took me out from everywhere. One day he took me out and took me to the holy of holies, to the theater director Mukhtar Ashrafi’s office. And he was our everything: not only the director of the theater, but also the rector of the conservatory and the composer, author of the operas “Dilorom” and “The Heart of the Poet.” And he really respected my dad, a violinist. Dad gave concerts in the Philharmonic, taught at the conservatory and recorded on the radio. But before each trip to the theater in Moscow, Mukhtar Ashrafovich asked: “Boris Alexandrovich, sit in the orchestra”; His father couldn’t refuse. So, when the director found out that I was his son, he didn’t throw me out, but he gave me tea.
Photo: Provided by the State Academic Bolshoi Theater named after Alisher Navoi (Tashkent)
When did you separate from him, from this theater?
Alexander Titel: He’s already a big boy. I went to school for physics and mathematics. It was the time of physicists and lyricists, this fascinated me terribly. Then he graduated from the Polytechnic, worked and other interests appeared. Until I had the feeling that maybe I had been wrong about something, I began to be drawn to theater again. And when the happy time at the Sverdlovsk Opera was behind me and I was already leading the opera group at MAMT, I returned to Tashkent and then the idea arose to stage something there. They suggested Handel’s Tamerlane. And although I teach the public to listen to the baroque, I would not risk including this opera in the repertoire. Does the Tashkent public have such skills? Will you listen to it? While everyone was discussing this, the director changed. Now the theater is directed by Ramiz Usmanov, a very brilliant and well-known tenor in Russia, who once won the Bolshoi Opera. We met at the Nano-Opera competition in Helikon and he offered to put on Un ballo in maschera.
The work took a long time, why?
Alexander Titel: Yes, in general, not so much: 11 months passed from the presentation of the design and sketches to the premiere. At the same time, ballets were also premiered there. It had been a long time since the theater produced such large-scale scenery, and that took time. And the costumes: a careful selection of fabrics, strict compliance with the style (I invited the set designer Viktor Shilkrot to the production, the costume designer was Olga Polikarpova). You see, I wanted to perform the play in the theater of my childhood, in the city that I love very much, to which I owe a lot; After all, Tashkent and Uzbekistan hosted hundreds of thousands of evacuees from across the USSR during the war. And the theater itself is beautiful, built according to Shchusev’s design using national traditions: hook carvings and paintings on the walls.
Judging by the costumes, the time of the action has moved from the 18th century to the 20th century. With what objective? What is the artistic logic?
Alexander Titel: Let’s remember the history of this opera: there are many transformations. Verdi wrote about the assassination of the Swedish king Gustav III, but this topic was immediately banned. After many options, the action moved to the United States, the hero became governor of Boston. At first, the artists and I thought about the time of Verdi, the time of Garibaldi, but this would require an incredible investment of money and time and very qualified sewing workshops. And then we were fascinated by the time of John Kennedy: the 60s of the last century.
But Italian opera is associated with a picturesque, costumed spectacle: the modern costumes of Verdi or Rossini depress me. Still, the music itself puts the action on certain street musicians.
Alexander Titel: In the last century, a canon of opera dress was formed. The artists were guided not so much by the true fashion of the time, but by opera as a separate country, where even love is different: operatic. There you should kiss the hands, press the palms to the heart. But it is impossible to reproduce an authentic era, as was done, for example, in Visconti’s film “The Leopard.” In many theaters this culture has been lost: qualified seamstresses are needed, expensive fabrics… As for the boots, it seems to me that they are not created from the costumes, but from the temporal distance between “now” and “then.” ”. The Kennedy era is now history and is already underway. Remember: the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the removal of Khrushchev.
How did the public receive it? After all, she is at the opera waiting for a show.
Alexander Title: With pleasure. Tickets were sold out in two days. And in the theater people little by little believed that this was possible and everyone worked hard. There are many good young singers in the company, they enthusiastically accepted the assigned tasks and that is the main thing. When artists want to do something that hasn’t been done before, you can move mountains with them.
Did an opera culture exist in Tashkent before the construction of the theater?
Alexander Titel: I don’t know. There were national and Russian dramatic theaters, a musical comedy theater and a conservatory. Then artists, poets, musicians and the Leningrad Conservatory, who were evacuated there during the war, played a very important role. Excellent teachers appeared, a choreographic school, a ten-year school at the Conservatory, several music schools were opened… Now Tashkent is a beautiful city of three million inhabitants with a dozen theaters and many universities.
You are one of those who brought active direction to our opera. Don’t you think that the director’s opera has entered a moment of crisis: people are tired of tricks that relegate music to the background? And I just want to listen without being distracted by the director’s riddles.
Alexander Titel: Each process has its apologists, third, fifth, ninth generation followers. And the further you go, the thinner it gets. But the conductor’s task remains the same: to extract the life of the human spirit from the totality of music and words. To obtain tears invisible to the world, a penetrating blow of the truth, to feel a pain of conscience… This is my task. The following are the means. And so, if the task and the means change places, what you are talking about emerges: artificial circumstances, deliberate proposals, characters and actions that move away from the music. There cannot be an opera without direction in the theater: someone still puts it on stage. We are talking about creating a staging, dictated by music in all its components. Chords, pauses, silences are born from these notes… The Tashkent artists jumped on this with so much joy, they began to fill the gaps of their ignorance, because, unfortunately, this is not taught. Even in Russia it is taught badly, and even more so there.
How does your theater, I mean MAMT, participate in the Theater in Cinema program?
Alexander Titel: There were meetings on the “Culture” channel, there was talk of showing recordings of opera performances in cinemas, as is done in the United States and Europe. There are many places in the country where there is no theater, but there are opera lovers. The result is that the Helikon film “The Queen of Spades” has already been filmed and “The Barber of Seville” will be released in January. This initiative seems very promising to me. But the quality of the recording is very important, especially the sound, in this aspect we are inferior to foreign filming, what the Medici or OperaVision channels offer. In the year of the pandemic, when the cinemas were closed, they increased their activity and asked us for recordings: we gave them “The Queen of Spades”, “War and Peace”, “Medea”, “The Love of Three Oranges”. “War and Peace” and “The Queen of Spades” received approximately 30 thousand visits each; It is as if we offered 30 performances in Europe in a theater with capacity for a thousand people.
Traditional question: what to expect in the coming seasons?
Alexander Titel: It is not easy for an organization as gigantic as an opera to recover from a pandemic, and last season we had a great project: “Norma” with Khibla Gerzmava, staged by Adolf Shapiro with Christian Knapp at the helm. But this season there are three premieres: “The Tsar’s Bride” was released, in March Evgeny Pisarev and Felix Korobov will release “Not Only Love” by Shchedrin, and in June Timur Zangiev and I will release “The Mermaid” by Dargomyzhsky. This is our Russian opera season.
So what’s next?
Alexander Titel: In 2026 it will be one hundred years since our theater moved to this house on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, 17. Then the Stanislavsky Opera Studio and the Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater merged in this building and performed alternately every two days. This is an important stage and a three-year plan has been drawn up. I can’t announce it, there will be a discussion with my colleagues. The viability of the plans depends on many factors. For example, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get foreign artists to act in a production, and sometimes it is necessary for the role to be played by a native of that particular culture. But perhaps in our next conversation I can talk in more detail about these projects.
THE NAIS IS OFFICIAL EDITOR ON NAIS NEWS