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It was a performance that deserved its ceremonial place of honor, despite Yevgeni Nesterenko's too stolid portrayal of Boris. For the second night the Bolshoi chose its year-old production of Prokofiev's The Gambler (1914-15). In drawing his libretto from the Dostoevsky novelette, Prokofiev eliminated traditional arias, choruses, recitative and orchestral tone painting in favor of rata-tat-tat dialogue that clung too closely to Dostoevsky's original. It was an innovative gamble on Prokofiev's part, and he lost. The Bolshoi lost too by giving The Gambler a highly stylized format, somewhere between La Ronde and Last Year at Marienbad, complete with strobe lights and turntables on turntables.
Unexpected Influence. The Bolshoi is spending four weeks at the Met. From there the company will move to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In addition to Boris, Onegin, War and Peace and The Gambler, the coming weeks will also bring Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades and The Dawns Are Quiet Here, a World War II reminiscence composed by the Bolshoi's director general Kiril Molchanov.
In Moscow the Bolshoi Opera stages five performances a week throughout its ten-month season—either in the 119-year-old Petrovsky Street Theater (2,200 seats) or in the Kremlin Palace of Congress (6,000 seats). The influence of those surroundings can make itself felt in unexpected ways. In the last-act forest scene of Boris, a nobleman is captured and beaten by rebelling peasants. Mussorgsky named him Khrushchev. But in the program printed for the U.S. tour, the Bolshoi denies poor old Khrushchev a name, listing him simply as a boyar.
William Bender