Tchaikovsky-Pushkin at the MET
Saturday, 26 March 2011 , 19.00

This Saturday I invite you to a universe where everything revolves around the power lines of an opera that has had Pushkin's words met Tchaikovsky's music, and which romantic essence has revived a late 18^th-century Saint Petersburg with plenty morals and shocking personal dramas. Of course, I am talking about the opera The Queen of Spades which is to be performed again this season at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, directed by Elijah Moshinsky and led by the talented Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons; it is an opera that we have the opportunity to broadcast live from the MET.

The Queen of Spades composed by Tchaikovsky for the Mariinsky Theatre in 1890 is actually a very powerful and realistic musical drama in which the German officer Hermann is a hero so consumed by his gambling passion that he uses young Lisa to get in the social circle of an old countess who, rumour has it, had won a fortune at card game due to a secrete combination. It is also a drama enacted in a charming musical performance as its suggestive power recreates to the finest architectural detail a space and time that only the Russian opera can imprint in our memories, in a nutshell: Tchaikovsky-Pushkin.

How long has it passed since we have talked and listened to a Russian opera?

Quite a while.

As I have just returned from New York - after an extraordinary experience in the studios of the Metropolitan Opera Radio - I can hardly wait to meet you again on Saturday, March 26^th 2011, to listen to a Queen of Spades that gathers the Russian tenor Vladimir Galouzine as Hermann and the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila as Lisa, mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick as the Countess, and baritones Alexey Markov as Tomsky, and Peter Mattei as Yeletsky, but still a delightful MET performance of Queen of Spades.