The Tale Of Tsar Saltan

‘I bring light and joy to many on earth, sorrow becomes sweet in a song; in a tale, fear becomes endearing.’ Years after Tsar Saltan had cast out his wife and son as a result of false accusations, the Swan Princess restores harmony and marries the tsarevich. This fairy tale by Pushkin, based on an old Russian folk legend, provided the ideal story for the great fairy-tale opera that Rimsky-Korsakov composed for the centenary of Pushkin’s birth in 1899. Like the poet, the composer found his own voice in a masterly narrative and rhapsodic style. The orchestration is of course very important as ‘part of the very soul of the work’. In this opera with a happy ending, Alain Altinoglu can revel in the role of orchestral wizard, as he did recently in The Golden Cockerel. Following his muchtalked- about production of Il Trovatore, the Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov returns with a fairy-tale ending to the opera season.