He knows his way around satire. With animals too. He also likes to tell stories: the Russian composer Alexander Raskatov, who now lives in France. He just celebrated his seventieth birthday and brought a gift to the "Opera Forward" festival of the National Opera in Amsterdam: his new opera "Animal Farm", based on the fable of George Orwell, written before the Ukrainian war.
Raskatov's first satirical opera, "A Dog's Heart" after Mikhail Bulgakov, was also premiered here in 2010. Orwell's material about the failure of the Soviet revolution could not be more topical at the moment. The program book prints the preface to the Ukrainian edition of the "Animal Farm" of 1947, in which the former Trotskyist sees the destruction of the Soviet myth as a prerequisite for the revival of the socialist movement. Raskatov, who was born on the day of Stalin's funeral on March 9, 1953, reads Orwell as a descendant and quotes Trotsky, Stalin and his henchman Lavrenti Beria in the libretto. He even sees in him an analogy to the figure of the Squealer (James Kryshak), whom he prescribes one of the most brutal scenes of the play.
Without prelude, with the first orchestral beat you are in the middle of the piece. Satire does not tolerate lengths. So the extended Dutch Chamber Orchestra gets down to business with seven percussionists, electric guitar and saxophone, sharp or sugar-sweet for the empty promises of Blacky (Elena Vassilieva), cooked and raw, whipped up to the point of mass hysteria in the excellent choir of the Amsterdam Opera. The construction of the windmill is greeted with socialist realism, and its destruction is bid farewell with a funeral march. Deep trombones announce the arrival of the printing press for "Pravda" until the prescribed "Goodthinking" is musically erased.
In the second part it becomes more "Russian", with folk song-like confessions of crimes never committed, cheering children's choirs and hypocritical laments. Raskatov also has his own style of brevity for the vocal parts, which is derived from the respective vocal range. Holly Flack wins a new altitude record in neighing as Mollie, the young vain mare who permanently groomes her ponytail. Old Major, the wise pig elder, has a noble grunting bass in Gennady Bezzubenkov, while the imperial Misha Kiria gives the corrupt pig Napoleon his baritonal ruler voice.
The idea for this production came years ago from director Damiano Michieletto, who now did the only right thing: no Russian bashing. He understands Orwell's fable literally and thus elevates it to the timeless and paradigmatic: the rule of pigs, who gradually take off their animal masks and increasingly resemble humans, becomes a historical continuum, regardless of their political colour (costumes by Klaus Bruns). It is power itself – its conquest, its preservation, its rituals, its paranoia – that Michieletto addresses. The scene for the revolt of the animals is the slaughterhouse, with cages, meat grinders, butchers in bloody aprons (stage design: Paolo Fantin). What happens in it is a process of slowing down, a freeze in lying about the doctrine issued in slow motion at the end: Napoleon is always right.