Writing
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The love story of young Countess Natasha Rostova and Count Pierre Bezukhov is interwoven with the Great Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon's invading army.
The support group for opera addicts is in session, and its participants perform Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery. Rarely performed outside Russia, and consigned to oblivion by Andrei Zhdanov's anti-formalist policies after the Second World War, the work is transformed by Dmitri Tcherniakov's extravagant staging. Under the baton of Daniel Barenboim, an all-star cast featuring Aida Garifullina and Violeta Urmana bring the characters to life on stage at Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
Sergei S. Prokofiev's monumental setting of Leo N. Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace. The composer and his wife Mira compressed the plot, set during Napoleon's Russian campaign, into a powerful sequence of scenes in which the love story between Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky and the description of the Russian army's fight against the French invasion alternate in rich contrast, and at the same time are closely interwoven. All is related by the music in its fullness of splendid themes and touchingly quiet moments. Prokofiev's musical-dramatic masterpiece combines social drama and historical chronicle in its 13 scenes to form an exuberant panorama. In this production by Dmitri Tcherniakov, the opera is performed in in Munich for the first time ever.
A 1998 production staring Anna Netrebko, Larissa Diadkova, Nikolai Gassiev, Aleksander Gergalov in this Kirov Opera & Ballet production of the Prokofiev opera, with Valery Gergiev conducting.
