vegan conductor

"Your Queen is dead!" "No, your Queen is dead!" ♠  Comparing the two Queens of Spades  ♠ Whenever you go to an opera performance of Eugene Onegin in Russia, there are always those dissatisfied people in the audience who argue that the characters are all portrayed wrong, how all modern productions are wrong, and basically how everything is wrong because some things aren’t “according to Pushkin”. Once I overheard someone commenting on Andriy Zholdak’s production at the Mikhailovsky Theatre (which is one of my favourite productions of Onegin!!) how it was “historically incorrect”! What? You mean, they didn’t have front-loader washing machines and microwaves in the 1820’s? Are you serious?! If we were to only value an operatic work (and its productions) on its likeness to the original text, then Tchaikovsky would fail instantly, as the very first words we hear in the opera Eugene Onegin (where Tatiana and Olga are singing a duet together) aren’t even...

Taking a closer look into Tchaikovsky's penultimate opera and the original short story by Pushkin that inspired it. What is life? A game! - from Herman's aria in Act III of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades ♠    ♠    ♠ When Hermann, the central figure featuring in Alexander Pushkin’s story of the Queen of Spades, finds out that the three cards: three , seven and ace were (supposedly) going to win him a fortune, everything around him started to resemble threes, sevens and aces and they even started to appear in his dreams: Seeing a young girl, he’d say: “How slender is she!.. A true Three of Hearts”. When asked “what’s the time?”, he’d answer: “five minutes to seven”. Every pot-bellied man would remind him of an ace. [1] While learning my third  opera by Tchaikovsky - the Queen of Spades (first Eugene Onegin , followed by Iolanta ), I started to notice how this opera was gradually taking over my brain similarly to how the thr...