Faust

In its 30th, jubilee, season, the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera turned its attention to the works of Charles Gounod for the first time. In his modern and expressive version of the classic opera Faust, director Yuri Alexandrov deals with the philosophical issues of being, man’s vocation, and the confrontation between heaven and hell, responding vividly and passionately to today's world events.

As Alexandrov said about his production, "Over the past decades we have witnessed a lot of attempts to zombify people. Many world regimes have tried to subdue the human mind and soul. This happened during the period of Communism, and, to some extent, it is also happening now. Just look at today’s information wars. People around the world are brainwashed in various ways. The invasion into human consciousness, the attempt to create a new Frankenstein -- that's what I see in the story of Faust. Obviously, this topic is very urgent and very important for me, so we will analyse it scrupulously. Gounod composed great music, and we took care of it. Although we did change the sequence of scenes in our production, this does not mean that we have cut anything from it. In my version, we emphasize all of the characters’ personal experiences. However, we are not trying to impose new personal qualities on the characters; we stick to the original ones."

General cast

Conductor

 

Maxim Valkov

 

Faust

 

Sergey Aleschenko / Vsevolod Kalmykov

 

Méphistophélès

 

Yuri Borschev

 

Marguerite

 

Tatiana Kalchenko

 

Wagner

 

Anton Morozov

 

Valentin

 

Egor Chubakov

 

Siébel / Cleopatra

 

Larisa Pominova

 

Marthe / Lais

 

 Natalia Vorobyeva

 

Featuring

 

St. Petersburg Chamber Opera's Orchestra and Chorus

Credits

Libretto after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Part I

 

Michel Carré / Jules Barbier

 

Director

 

Yuri Alexandrov

 

Set and costume designer

 

Vyacheslav Okunev

 

Lighting designer

 

Irina Vtornikova

 

Voice coach

 

Yana Zubova

 

Chorus director

 

Igor Pototskiy

 

Choreographer

 

Nadezhda Kalinina

 

Video designer

 

Daniil Bakalin

Premiere

 

May 27, 2017