| “Novaya Opera has received significant praise for their production of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger, which had its long-awaited premiere in Russia at the Novaya Opera of Moscow on 27 January. The opera was led by music director and conductor Jan Latham-Koenig and featured a stellar cast and impressive stage design by Larissa Lomakina. Reviewers and audience members, including the composer’s daughter, lauded Jan Latham-Koenig and the orchestra for their performance, stating that they “performed perfectly with great care and respect for the music and underlining the nerve and documentary of the setting” (Victoria Weinberg)”. ICA International Classical Artists “The music, splendid as it is, produces a strong impression in Jan Latham-Koenig’s interpretation: it is really global power and cosmic grief.
All members of the production team have shown themselves to the best of their ability. Shirokov has made a good realistic production with numerous symbolic and allegoric video inserts: there is a screen over the stage and there we see the main characters’ faces in close up, angry muzzles of growling camp dogs, a birch grove and embraces of lovers from the normal prewar days.The Novaya Opera’s soloist Natalia Kreslina did not just sing excellently. She did not just manage to make her Marta a courageous martyr. Her Marta is a symbol of eternal sorrow. And the final soliloquy of the ex-prisoner is a binding reflection on the horrors of Europe’s recent history, on memory and its meaning; on the importance of drawing a lesson from the past and not falling into the same trap”. Revizor.ru, 28 January 2017 “The Passenger at the Novaya Opera is one of those productions that make us think not only about its form or quality, but also about the global historical, moral and humanistic principles of human existence. And about the disaster that can be brought on by contravention of these principles.
It is another break through in the triumphal return of the outstanding composer’s works to the Russian audience”. Moskovsky Komsomolets, 28 January 2017 “The Novaya Opera’s production happens to be the first staging of The Passenger in Moscow with its texture that is most difficult for opera: a concentration camp, human tortures, executions, abuses, and barbed wire. But Weinberg’s opera is not only about the horror of Auschwitz, but also about human conscience, the hell of the pan-human soul suffering from committed crimes and irretrievable losses of lives.The artists’ work in this production cannot be called acting; it is a collective experience of horror, immersion in anguish, in the nightmare of the senseless annihilation of lives. <…>
The artists sing with incredible sound strain, with intensity, anger and, at the same time, with soulfulness, living whole heartedly through the tragic human lives from the times that cannot be forgotten. Natalia Kreslina (Marta), Valeria Pfister (Lisa), Dmitry Pianov (Walter), Victoria Shevtsova (Katya), Polina Shamaeva (Krystina), Alexandra Saulskaya-Shulyatieva (Bronka) and all the other artists convey Weinberg’s principal message: in order to get over the horrible past, it is not to be forgotten”. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 30 January 2017 |
