Changes to the forthcoming season
We would like to bring to the public’s attention a change to the programme for the forthcoming season. The première of Carmen planned for this autumn has been postponed. This difficult decision has been made due to economic considerations. The day-to-day activities of the theatre and its ability to plan ahead depend heavily on funding from both local and federal budgets. We have so far received no confirmation of federal funding for the coming year.
The decision to postpone the première was made by Vladimir Kekhman, Artistic Director of the Mikhailovsky Theatre. „We are currently operating under uncertain conditions and don’t know what level of funding will be available to the theatre in 2016“, he explains. „For several seasons, the theatre has received reliable federal support in the form of a grant, alongside funding from the St. Petersburg city budget. This year, for example, the theatre received around RUB 130 million. The current difficulties surrounding the delivery of the federal budget are well known, and we are unable to forecast how much funding we will receive from the central government next year. Under these circumstances, I felt the best course of action would be to postpone Carmen (a very expensive and technically challenging undertaking) until the 2016/17 season. This will allow us to save RUB 56 million for our reserve fund. Currently, the most important thing is to ensure that we are always able to pay the salaries of the theatre’s staff.“
Director Andriy Zholdak and stage designer George Tsypin, who created the production, are understanding of Vladimir Kekhman’s decision. Zholdak is the director behind the highly popular version of Eugene Onegin which returned to the Mikhailovsky Theatre this season. George Tsypin is known for his work at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala and the Bolshoi Theatre, as well as for directing the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sochi. At the start of this season, he worked alongside Jürgen Flimm on our production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.
The fact that the leading roles in Carmen were to be sung predominantly by guest artists had a significant bearing on the cost of the production. The current situation has forced the Mikhailovsky Theatre to reassess its priorities. „No matter how much we would like to keep this production in our programme, I feel it is more important to give our own singers the chance to show what they are capable of“, continues Kekhman. „After Svetlana Moskalenko’s brilliant performance at the International Tchaikovsky Competition, we are preparing Donizetti’s opera Don Pasquale especially for her, initially as a concert performance which might later be fully-staged. I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to any audience members whose plans for the autumn have been inconvenienced.“
Vladimir Kekhman has taken similar measures before. In 2008, he made the decision to cancel a scheduled première. Soon after his appointment as director, he took the decision not to stage a version of Eugene Onegin that was a copy of an earlier Stalin-era production and did not meet the Mikhailovsky Theatre’s artistic quality standards. Carmen was last performed at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in July 2012, in a concert performance conducted by Vasily Petrenko, starring the Israeli mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham, with Dmitry Golovin as Don José and Alexander Vinogradov as Escamillo.
