Barbers of Seville and Siberia
November 06, 2009 - by Dean GarnerA slim but real connection--in the past few days I saw The Barber of Seville at the Metropolitan Opera and watched--long overdue--Nikita Mikhalkov's lovely film The Barber of Siberia. Both provided huge pleasure.
I had seen the Met production before. But the novelty was the lead, Joyce DiDonato, an American soprano who created as fresh and delightful a Rosina as I've ever seen or heard. That's a tall order, because there have been many truly wonderful Rosina's, and a soprano who doesn't merely want to imitate past performances has to be truly inventive. DiDonato is lovely and a lovely, winning actress. She found new phrasing and emphases, had the courage to throw away a few beloved tried and true turns, and shaped her arias with great skill. This, as many have observed, is truly a golden age for the mezzo-soprano: DiDonato has many rivals, if one sees this as a contest. But I will certainly make sure to hear her in anything she sings at the Met in the future.
Nikita Mikhalkov is one of my favorite directors. His Burnt by the Sun is one of my all-time favorite movies, hugely deserving of its Oscar for best foreign film. One of the stars of that film, Oleg Menshikov, also stars in The Barber of Siberia. He's an extraordinarily charismatic actor. In this film, he has lots of company. There's a whole crowd of fellow cadets who broke my heart when they are seeing him off at a train station. I won't reveal the occasion. But it's a unique group performance they put in, never to be forgotten. Set in the final decades of czarist Russia, this film is full of Russian cliches, but wonderful ones, wonderfully and lovingly presented--vodka, performing bears, aristocrats, the Kremlin. And it's permeated with opera, since Oleg's character is cast as Figaro, the barber of Seville, in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. While this film doesn't carry the weighty seriousness of Burnt by the Sun, it still manages to explore a range from hilarity to tragedy. See it and Burnt By the Sun. I don't see how you could fail to like either of them.
