Music: Russlan, Ludmilla and Sarah

The overture to Mikhail Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla is one of the most overworked pops-concert favorites. It is also one of the best—taut, joyously melodic, brilliantly orchestrated. Thanks to the inquisitive Sarah Caldwell, we now know what follows the overture—an equally delightful opera. With Caldwell on the podium and in charge of stagecraft, the Opera Company of Boston opened its 19th season last week with the first known staging in the U.S. of this Russian classic.

Though Caldwell’s career as a symphonic conductor continues to flourish (she made her Boston Symphony debut in January), she is a musician who belongs to the stage. She knows how to underscore the big moments in an opera and camouflage the weak ones. Russlan may have its dull moments, but they were hard to detect at Boston’s Orpheum Theater, the shabby old moviehouse that currently shelters Sarah and her troupe. Fire belched from a dragon’s mouth. A huge severed head blinked a bloodshot eye and sang. Horses flew. So did a witch on a broomstick. So did Russlan and an evil magician, dueling madly away above a castle. How Caldwell managed all that (the stage at the Orpheum is only 26 feet deep and has no wing space to speak of) is her secret. It is enough to say that the results were full of energy and surprise.

Sleeping Beauty. Russlan, based on a Pushkin poem, begins in the palace of the Prince of Kiev, where the wedding of the knight Russlan and the princess Ludmilla is about to be celebrated. In a pouf of smoke, Ludmilla is abducted by the wicked dwarf Tchernomor. The rest of the opera concerns Russlan’s travails in trying to find her ahead of two other suitors; the prince has promised Ludmilla to the first man who can rescue her. A kind of Russian Siegfried, Russlan receives a magic sword from that singing head but in the end requires a magic ring to wake his sleeping beauty from an evil spell.

Glinka (1804-57) was the father of Russian nationalistic music. To listen to Russlan, composed in 1842, is to hear much that followed in the work of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, the young Stravinsky, even the Prokofiev of Love for Three Oranges. Russlan is a delicious fairy tale scored with lightness and quick invention. The orchestration confirms accounts of Glinka’s thorough knowledge of Mozart and Rossini. His inclusion of Russian folk music, Turkish airs, even the whole-tone scale from the Orient (more than half a century before Debussy) suggests that he was exceptionally curious and open-minded.

Sweet Wizard. Caldwell’s long-time partners, Set Designers Helen Pond and Herbert Senn, have devised one of their loveliest productions—a succession of murals and drops, in blacks, golds and reds, patterned after the finely detailed Palekh lacquered boxes that were fashionable in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. The Canadian bass Victor Braun and the American coloratura Jeanette Scovotti, both of whom work primarily in Europe, made a valiant pair of lovers. John Moulson, a member of East Berlin’s Komische Oper, sang the wizard with an uncommonly sweet and powerful tenor. From Pittsburgh Soprano Marianna Christos, in the minor role of a slave girl, came the most exciting singing of the evening. Here is a voice with joy and heartbreak in it.

The conducting was strong when it had to be, gossamer light when that was necessary. Obviously Caldwell is benefiting from her orchestral work around the U.S. Equally obvious, she deserves the opera house she is still trying to build—and not just because someone strolled easily into the Orpheum during Act I on opening night and burgled the dressing rooms.

William Bender