A Fairytale Under the Open Sky

In late August, the Astrakhan Kremlin once again became an opera stage. Cathedral Square hosted the premiere of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan – a new production within the Russian Operas in the Astrakhan Kremlin project. This time, Pushkin’s familiar world was combined with modern stage technology: the performance featured animation, complex technical solutions and aerial stunts.

The production was staged by director Mikhail Pandzhavidze. At the podium of the symphony orchestra of the Astrakhan State Opera and Ballet Theatre was the theatre’s artistic director, Honoured Artist of Russia Valery Voronin. The performance featured soloists from Russia’s leading stages: the role of Tsar Saltan was sung on different evenings by Mikhail Kolelishvili of the Mariinsky Theatre and Oleg Budaratsky of Ural Opera.

For The Tale of Tsar Saltan, the Kremlin proves an almost natural setting. Pushkin’s fairy tale, Rimsky-Korsakov’s music and the ancient architecture work here in unison, transforming a traditional opera production into a grand open-air city event. This year, Cathedral Square hosted the large-scale opera for the eleventh time.

The ‘Russian Operas in the Astrakhan Kremlin’ project itself was launched back in 2012. Since then, productions have included Boris Godunov, Prince Igor, Khovanshchina, Ruslan and Lyudmila, Ivan Susanin, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia and other works from the Russian repertoire. The principle behind the project remains unchanged: opera steps out of the theatre building into the historic space of the city, becoming part of its image — both cultural and touristic.

The idea also has a thoroughly practical effect. The Astrakhan Kremlin seats around 2,500 spectators, and an open-air stage demands its own acoustic engineering: as Valery Voronin explained in an interview with Watch Russia, performances use some 120 microphones and two large multi-channel consoles, while the sound engineers must even take the strong Astrakhan wind into account. Crucially, the stage is never enclosed within a theatrical ‘box’, so that the architecture of the Kremlin remains part of the performance.

Over the years of the festival, the cultural image of the city itself has also changed. In an interview with Watch Russia, Valery Voronin said that the theatre is deliberately trying to move Astrakhan beyond the familiar associations with fishing, caviar and the Volga, and to establish its status as one of the cultural centres of the Russian South.