By Ralph P. Locke

Rimsky-Korsakov’s delightful village comedy, based on a Gogol short story, receives a modern recording that features a superb international cast.

Christmas Eve, Rimsky-Korsakov

Julia Muzychenko (Oksana), Enkelejda Shkosa (Solokha/Woman with a Violet Nose), Andrei Popov (Devil), Georgy Vasiliev (Vakula), Alexey Tikhomirov (Chub), Anthony Robin Schneider (Deacon).

Frankfurt Opera/ Sebastian Weigle.

Naxos 660543-44 [2 CDs] 147 minutes.

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Russian music is one of the great treasures of world culture. The symphonies of Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich, the piano concertos of Rachmaninoff, and Musorgsky’s highly pictorial piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition are known and loved by millions. But Russian opera is a challenge, especially nowadays when the preferred practice at major opera houses is to sing operas in the original language. Few singers besides those from Eastern Europe are comfortable singing in Russian. And, even with help from supertitles, audiences may not respond strongly, unless they’ve at least picked up some basic vocabulary: words like love, night, truth, and God. Recordings help, of course: many of us have been eased into an understanding of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin by the many remarkable and varied recordings available of each.

I am typical of most American opera lovers in this respect. Aside from Boris and Onegin, I’ve greatly enjoyed and been moved at times by, at most, only a few other operas from Russia: Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (at the Met, with Karita Mattila as Lisa) and his Iolanta (in a Met TV transmission starring Anna Netrebko, before the Met cancelled her contract because of her unwillingness to distance herself plainly from the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (in a 1960s film in which Galina Vishnevskaya acts up a storm while lip-synching quite effectively to her own singing).

So I have delighted in the opportunity, over the past few years, to sink myself into the orchestral and vocal glories of some operas by Rimsky-Korsakov, a composer whom most of us known almost solely from his orchestral works, or maybe from just one: Sheherazade. The first work that I tried is the only one that is regularly performed outside of Russia: The Golden Cockerel (often known by the French title of Le coq d’or), with its famous “Hymn to the Sun” for coloratura soprano. Then the grandly scaled and heavily mythological The Snow Maiden (I reviewed a rerelease of an old Soviet recording in American Record Guide, May/June 2019). Then Kashchei the Immortal (same magazine, and another ancient recording, Sept/Oct 2020), which focuses more on powerful and evil supernatural forces at work in the world. All of these reveal a composer who was ceaselessly inventive (he loved tinkering with unusual scales and modes) and knew how to make a vocal line soar and an orchestra offer constantly engaging commentary.

I was therefore intrigued when a new recording (finally, not a mono re-release!) was announced of his village comedy, Christmas Eve (1895), an opera that is based on a well-known short story by Nikolai Gogol. The translated libretto, available open-access at Naxos.com, helped me enormously to grasp why a character is getting excited or lachrymose, pouty or menacing. (But a complaint to Naxos: please include track numbers in all online libretti!)

The story centers on Vakula, a blacksmith, and his beloved Oksana. (Tchaikovsky, too, based an opera on Gogol’s story: Vakula the Blacksmith, later reworked by that composer as Cherevichki, i.e., The Slippers.) The story takes the form of a folk tale but the narrative is enriched, as was Rimsky-Korsakov’s preference, with pantheistic (i.e., pre-Christian) elements, often focusing on the changes of season and/or on the supernatural, including a big sung role for the Devil himself.

A scene featuring Oksana (Julia Muzychenko) in the Frankfurt Opera production of Christmas Eve. Photo: Monika Rittershaus

The human part of the story has Oksana refusing to return the affections of the lovesick Vakula (I like to think of him as a smitten smith) unless he can bring her a pair of slippers that belong to the tsarina (princess). Vakula’s odyssey is complicated by the fact that the Devil is angry at Vakula’s mother, Solokha, who is, as some of her neighbors are beginning to suspect, a witch.

The Devil comes to earth to mess things up for Vakula, but the sturdy smith stuffs him into a sack, and does the same with three men who are vying for Solokha’s affections. The Devil manages to get out of the sack, and Vakula, wielding a crucifix, forces the demon to fly him to St. Petersburg (to get the slippers). An impressive, glittering orchestral passage describes the stars that they pass as they soar. Solokha and Patsyuk (who has magic powers: food jumps into his mouth) try to impede Vakula’s progress by flying near him on, respectively, a broom and a mortar (as in mortar-and-pestle). I think I’ve got all of this right: the constant mixing of the commonplace and the fantastical is quite startling.

Vakula does reach the court, where the Zaporozhian Cossacks (from what is now Ukraine) are presenting a petition to the Tsar, their procession supported by a grand orchestral polonaise.

All works out for the best: the tsarina, amused, accedes to Vakula’s boorish request for some of her footwear; two supernatural figures — the young god Ovsen and the virgin Kolyada (mimed roles) — reunite, allowing winter to arrive; Vakula returns home, where Oksana now returns Vakula’s affections and regrets her former petulance; and there is a final tribute to the great poet (Gogol) who will one day write all of this up.

A ballerina (Ayelet Polne) and a bear (Pascu Ortí) shaking a leg in the Frankfurt Opera production of Christmas Eve. Photo: Monika Rittershaus

The vocal lines that Rimsky-Korsakov gives to the characters are often quick and conversational, over elegantly tuneful lines in the orchestra (including some memorable motifs that keep recurring, and modulating, in the solo winds). In addition, one or another character pauses at times to sing a solo that is more or less strophic, in the manner of a folk song, religious canticle, or salon “romance.” The romance or parlor song was common in middle-class homes and aristocratic salons in Russia no less than in France, Italy, and the German-speaking lands. It eventually gave birth to the more complex “art song” — known in France as mélodie. But here the point of reference is a simple, artless type of song, though handled by the composer with great artfulness!

There is a delightful chattering duet for two village women (insulting each other), which I suppose is a reminder of how closely Rimsky-Korsakov’s music sometimes gets to that of Musorgsky’s operatic style when they each aim their music to reflect speech-as-heard.

To judge by Rimsky-Korsakov’s preface to the work (printed in the libretto), many of the simpler tunes heard here are Christmas carols sung in Ukraine. Indeed, the subtitle of the work is (to adopt Richard Taruskin’s English rendering of it) a “Christmas carol-come-to-life”. There’s a chorus in grand Russian Orthodox style, complete with striding root-position progressions that one doesn’t hear in choral music of Western Europe. A few moments work up a good head of steam dramatically (much as in some operas by Verdi and Wagner). Several substantial passages for orchestra — including the expansive, outer-space-invoking prelude — are so impressive and satisfying that the composer made a suite of them, now familiar through recordings conducted by, among others, Ernest Ansermet and Neeme Järvi.

Most of the previously available recordings were made in Russia decades ago. This new one comes from staged performances in the winter of 2021-22 at the Frankfurt Opera, under the alert baton of Sebastian Weigle, and is sung, like the ones made in Russia, in Russian. The principal roles are taken by Russian singers. (The marvelously firm and clear soprano grew up in Russia, despite her Ukrainian name.) The internationally renowned Enkelejda Shkosa (spelled Shkoza in the booklet), from Albania, is rich-voiced and incisive as the witch Solokha.

Smaller roles are taken by Germans, Britons, Americans and two from New Zealand. I’d fly through the stars to hear mezzo Bianca Andrew, the tsarina here, in a bigger role.

To my ignorant ear, the singers all pronounce the language well and create credible characters. Each brings a solid tone to the task, with very little wobble and no barking or shouting, and all are perfectly on pitch. I’ve listened to parts of the old Golovanov recording (made in 1948!) and found the singing there even more splendid than on the new recording (especially Dmitri Tarkhov, as Vakula) and characterized at least as well. Furthermore, the older recordings may be preferred by a listener who knows Russian and so can appreciate the accuracy and subtle nuances that native singers can bring. (Any recent re-releases of the old recordings probably lack a libretto — certainly the big Profil boxed set that includes the Golovanov recording lacks one — so Naxos’s downloadable one can help anybody who, say, streams the Golovanov on Spotify!)

The Frankfurt orchestra seems smallish but full-toned and tightly rehearsed, and is, of course, captured better than on the monophonic Golovanov. The audience, too, sounds small when they applaud (appreciatively). Most of the applause has, gratifyingly, been edited out.

A high-flying scene from the Frankfurt Opera production of Christmas Eve. Photo: Monika Rittershaus

My operatic horizons have been opened by hearing this folk-and-mythological opera by a composer who was enormously inventive in his handling of harmony: the supernatural scenes use cycles of minor thirds that sometimes generate an octatonic scale, from all of which the young Stravinsky learned a great deal. The fresh and colorful orchestration includes a celesta, a mere three years after its introduction into Russian music through Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Yet the folklike aspects are also clear: Vakula’s first solo makes prominent use of a phrase that resembles one near the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Marche slave. The resulting mixture of sophisticated and naïve enchanted me.

I encourage other opera lovers to get to know the operas of Rimsky-Korsakov — there are over a dozen of them (depending on how one counts). Christmas Eve seems a great place to start, perhaps more than the better-known The Golden Cockerel (which, to my taste, repeats certain passages of music many times with little change).

Naxos has also released this recording as a DVD and as a Blu-ray (with different catalog numbers). I’d love to see these able operatic performers (plus the dancers who play certain mythological characters, the stars in the sky, etc.) act out all the intriguing exchanges heard here! But listening, even without seeing, brings immense rewards.

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). He is part of the editorial team of Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal, an open-access source that includes contributions by performers (soprano Elly Ameling) as well as noted scholars (Robert M. Marshall, Peter Bloom) and is read around the world. The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and appears here with kind permission.