Firma Melodiya presents an album with two rare operas of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov – The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga and Mozart and Salieri.
Both of the one-act operas were written in the second half of the 1890s, in the period of the great Russian composer’s new heyday. Mozart and Salieri continued a peculiar tradition that was begun by Alexander Dargomyzhsky in The Stone Guest, a musical incarnation of Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. Similar to its predecessor, Rimsky-Korsakov did not change anything in Pushkin’s text turning the opera into a continuous dialogue of two characters. The citation from Mozart’s Requiem wonderfully fits into the musical development of the opera that is based on a striking contrast between the descriptions of the symbolically generalized figures – the Genius and the Envious One.
The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga emerged as an addition (prologue) to Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov that he worked on in those years. The scale and certain independence of this musical and dramatic picture that tells a story of secret love between the young Ivan the Terrible and a young boyarynia, as well as the difference in the author’s musical style that evolved over twenty years of his artistic career, induced him publish The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga as an individual work.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas were recorded in 1986 by the company of the USSR Bolshoi Theatre led by the prominent conductor Mark Ermler starring Tamara Milashkina, Nina Grigorieva, Evgeny Nesterenko, Alexander Fedin and other leading soloists of the theatre.
