A Brutal Cossack Hero Strides Into Brooklyn

Introducing himself to the audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night, George Isaakyan, the artistic director of the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater of Perm, said the members of his company were “happy and proud” to be appearing in New York. “And nervous,” he added.

The baritone Viktor Chernomortsev and the soprano Irina Krikunova of the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater of Perm.

Mr. Isaakyan seemed serious. In addition to the academy performance, a production of Tchaikovsky’s opera “Mazeppa,” the company is presenting a program of familiar and unfamiliar arias and scenes from Tchaikovsky operas at Carnegie Hall on Friday night, its first time on that renowned stage. So, Mr. Isaakyan said, the tour is a milestone for this 135-year-old company from Perm, a city in the Ural Mountains region of Russia that is sometimes called a gateway to Siberia.

Perhaps nervousness accounted for some of the shakiness of Wednesday’s performance. The company is considered the third most important opera and ballet theater in Russia, after the Kirov in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi in Moscow, and there were affecting qualities to the orchestra playing and the singing. Here was a troupe of artists immersed in the style and language of 19th-century Russian opera.

Yet the technical lapses in the orchestra, the vocal inconsistencies and the makeshift look of Mr. Isaakyan’s abstract production suggest that financing may be tight and times challenging in Perm. The sets consisted mostly of hung sheets, projected images of water and sky, and a metaphorical motif of gigantic bent nails.

“Mazeppa,” completed in 1883, is a rich, long (nearly three hours) and deeply moving work. Thanks to Valery Gergiev, audiences in New York have been able to experience it twice in the last decade. In 1998 Mr. Gergiev brought the Kirov Opera production to the Metropolitan Opera House, a magnificent performance in a bare-bones staging. And in 2006 the Met presented a production, spearheaded by Mr. Gergiev, who conducted. It was a garish, convoluted show, but another great evening of music.

Adapted from an epic poem by Pushkin, “Mazeppa” is based loosely on the life of the late-17th-century Ukrainian separatist Ivan Mazeppa, a Cossack overlord who formed an alliance with the Swedish king, turned on Czar Peter, started a rebellion and was put down. Today he is considered a hero of Ukrainian nationalism.

As Tchaikovsky portrays him, Mazeppa is an overreaching, boorish man of 70, who falls for Maria, the trusting young daughter of his friend Kochubei, a Ukrainian nobleman. Not surprisingly, Tchaikovsky focuses on the ambiguous romantic threads of the story. The winsome Maria seems to love the gruff, avenging Mazeppa, until she realizes the depth of his brutality and goes mad in the final scene. Tchaikovsky introduces another character, Andrei, Maria’s childhood friend, an earnest youth who adores her to no avail.

The conductor, Valery Platonov, mostly got the big things right, conducting the score with sweep and flow. But the playing was often rough and scrappy. As Maria, the soprano Irina Krikunova took time to warm up. But once she did, she sang with cool, lustrous sound and lyrical poignancy. Though his voice has a weak patch in its low range, the baritone Viktor Chernomortsev brought earthy colorings and husky power to his portrayal of Mazeppa.

As Kochubei, who is tortured and executed when he rallies his forces and turns on the power-crazed Mazeppa, the bass Aleksandr Pogudin created a pitiable figure, though his nasal-toned voice was unstable. The tenor Pavel Bragin, a bookish and endearing Andrei, was also vocally uneven, sometimes singing with tight tone and faulty pitch. The formidable soprano Tatyana Poluektova stole every scene she was in as Maria’s mother, Lyubov.

The hero of the evening was Tchaikovsky, who left us a stunning and underappreciated opera.

The Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater of Perm will present a Tchaikovsky concert on Friday night at Carnegie Hall; (212) 247-7800, carnegiehall.org.

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