Gambling addiction, failure and self-destruction – these themes were only too well known to Sergei Prokofiev from his own life when he wrote his opera The playerbased on a novel by Dostoyevsky. In the fictional town of Roulettenburg, all kinds of broken characters meet in the casino. At the centre is a heavily indebted general – who is longingly waiting for the death and the money of his old relative Babulenka so that he can finally play the sugar daddy for his young girlfriend Blanche – and his somewhat sociopathic stepdaughter Polina, who is in a relationship with a greedy marquis, but also takes advantage of the tutor Alexei Ivanovich, who has a crush on her. In the course of the story, they all lose either all their money or their dignity – and some of them lose both.
Sean Panikkar (Alexej), Nicole Chirka (Blanche), Michael Arivony (Astley), Asmik Grigorian (Polina)
© SF | Ruth Walz
The material would therefore provide plenty of content for a gripping evening of opera; however, not in the interpretation by Peter Sellars at the Salzburg Festival, which – if one is brutally honest – cannot really be described as direction, but rather as loveless low-budget illustration. The set consists of intergalactic wasp traps, which are probably meant to represent stylized roulette tables. Sometimes they flash and sometimes they float from the flies, but they never offer any added value.
Asmik Grigorian (Polina) and Sean Panikkar (Alexej Ivanovich)
© SF | Ruth Walz
The stage floor and the wall of the Felsenreitschule are covered with a bit of green fabric and about a quarter of the huge stage is completely ignored and used at most for entrances and exits. The director has moved the action to the present day, emails are sent instead of telegrams, Babulenka has been shopping in the duty free shop and Alexei Ivanovich smears a German baron with orange paint in the manner of a climate activist; why he does this is not clear from the libretto or the direction of the characters.
The player
© SF | Ruth Walz
There is hardly any of that at all, and the entire show seems as if Sellars had not thought of anything about the characters, their emotions, their relationships with each other and the motives behind their actions, which is why they all exist relatively pale and completely irrelevant. As a viewer, you simply feel nothing for these characters – not even disgust or glee – and if it were a Netflix series, hardly anyone would stick around after the pilot episode.
Sean Panikkar (Alexej Ivanovich)
© SF | Ruth Walz
Fortunately, the evening was saved on the musical front, because what the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Timur Zangiev, played was a great sound cinema. There was a fine balance between mercilessly whipped-up passages and moments full of lyrical tenderness. All the wishes and disappointments of souls on the brink of destruction, which are dealt with in Dostoyevsky’s material, were explored in the pit in a colorful and differentiated way and combined to form a gripping sound psychogram of the depths of human nature.
Sean Panikkar also gave an impressive performance as Alexei Ivanovich, who gradually becomes addicted to gambling. Not only to master this role with all its dramatic outbursts vocally, but also to make it seem effortless and to deliver nuanced performances right up to the last note, is nothing less than a top performance.
Sean Panikkar (Alexej), Violeta Urmana (Babulenka), Joseph Parrish (Potapytsch), Asmik Grigorian
© SF | Ruth Walz
Peixin Chen did not really give the retired general a profile on stage, but his elegantly controlled, voluminous bass flowed through the part, sometimes tumultuously blustering and then again intriguingly flattering, so that vocally it was quite clear what a false, unsympathetic character we were dealing with here. Juan Francisco Gatell interpreted the Marquis no less pointedly and shadyly with a bright-timbered tenor.
Asmik Grigorian spent a lot of time on stage in silence and it seemed as if she herself didn’t really know why her Polina had to sit or lie around all the time. When she was finally allowed to sing, however, we were treated to fiery, flaring moments (such as in the final scene) in which her soprano shimmered in dark colors and Polina’s complex character was explored, at least through her vocal performance.
Juan F. Gatell (Marquis), Nicole Chirka (Blanche), Sean Panikkar, Peixin Chen (Der General a. D.)
© SF | Ruth Walz
The evening only really picked up speed when Violeta Urmana entered the stage and had Babulenka launch an all-out attack against the general. What was impressive was not only her handling of the text – every word hit the mark like a poison arrow! – and the nuanced tones she used, but also her enormous presence, which suddenly made the large stage of the Felsenreitschule shrink to the size of a chamber play and was able to bring the character to life, regardless of every directorial trick.
Sean Panikkar (Alexej Ivanovich), Violeta Urmana (Babulenka) and Asmik Grigorian (Polina)
© SF | Ruth Walz
Of the numerous smaller roles, Michael Arivony stood out in particular as the evenly-voiced Mr. Astley and Nicole Chirka, who gave Blanche not only a pleasant sound but also human characteristics. The choir was also excellent, having a particularly strong moment in the auditorium of the Felsenreitschule, which completely pushed the production into the background, which briefly made me think that, given this scenic nothingness, a concert performance of the work would have been sufficient.
***11
