Bolshoi Troubles

Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater sits astride Teatralnaya Square, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. It is one of the most visible and famous landmarks in the capital, but today, and for at least another 20 months, it is wrapped up—hidden behind huge scaffolding—as a mammoth reconstruction program, four years old and counting, drags on and on.

above the building, cranes move slowly and the sound of construction work can be heard coming from what was once the main stage—where Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake premiered and the likes of Rudolf Nureyev danced.

Behind and to the left of the building, is the New Bolshoi Theater, where today’s opera and ballet performances are played out.

Inside the atrium of the New Bolshoi, an unusually large collection of journalists packs in for the traditional annual press conference to announce shows for the Bolshoi Theater’s 234th season.

Outside the room, the Bolshoi noticeboard speaks of a less glamorous life in the theater. An advertisement for a flat is pinned next to an offer for chest x-rays for troupe members; a note asks if anyone wants to go on a day trip to Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana; the headstone on a late ballerina’s grave will be unveiled at a local cemetery.

As a visitor looked at the board, a Bolshoi employee snapped for them to go away, as the notices are an “internal matter.”

A few meters way, a hundred journalists are interested in more serious internal matters: the resignation of Alexander Vedernikov, the theater’s musical director, who accused theater bosses of failing the theater; and the recent opening of a criminal case investigating  embezzlement of reconstruction funds.

the reconstruction has been beset with problems since its outset. The reopening date has been delayed twice and the new date, October 2, 2011, (two years late), is presently in doubt. The budget has spiralled out of control, to a reported $1.5 billion. That’s billion. With a “b.”

Many were asking where all the money was being spent long before the Audit Chamber dropped its bombshell in early September. That body’s investigation reported that the cost for the original design project was sixteen times the original estimate and that costs had been deliberately inflated.

The company contracted to draw up plans for the reconstruction, Kurortproyekt, has denied any wrongdoing, but criminal investigations are already underway.

The Bolshoi’s general director, Anatoly Iskanov, warned that the embezzlement charges could delay the Bolshoi’s opening even further.

“These investigations could seriously delay the reconstruction process as the heads and directors of the reconstruction work on a tight deadline,” Iskanov said. “If you distract them now, then it will take up quite a lot of time.”

He said there was an explanation for different design plans. “That company won a tender in 1999, before the closure of the theater, and nobody knew then the true state of dereliction the building was in. Only after the theater had moved out could the builders remove the stucco and see the huge cracks, which demanded extra work.” Iskanov said new documents and designs had to be assembled ad hoc.

In a country where embezzlement of state-funded construction is considered, in popular perception, the norm rather than an exception, there is widely-held suspicion that the Audit Chamber accusations are just the tip of the iceberg, said Alexei Klimenko, who sits on a city board that advises the city on architecture.

back in the atrium, at the news conference, Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov was presented as the Bolshoi’s new musical director. His appointment to fill Vedernikov’s shoes surprised many—it is a job usually given to a leading conductor. Desyatnikov, it was announced, will not conduct, but will instead rely on five top conductors to lead performances over the next two seasons.

Desyatnikov, who has composed music for opera and film, is best known for writing the music for the opera Rosenthal’s Children, set to a libretto by writer Vladimir Sorokin. The opera premiered at the Bolshoi in 2005 and was one of the most controversial productions there in decades. It was attacked by the Kremlin-backed youth group Nashi as immoral and pornographic.

Desyatnikov’s first words spoke of crisis management for the homeless troupe, which must endure the departure of another leading figure. “I am not the real musical chief of the Bolshoi Theater,”  Desyatnikov said. “You can view my work as a kind of crisis management. First of all, it is psychotherapy. After all, it is a theatre and not a ballbearings factory. As far as I know, I can get along with people and it is possible I can clear up some difficult situations.”

There are a lot of difficult situations.

“The Bolshoi Theater does not have any of the life signs of a creative organization,” Vedernikov said when he quit in July, adding that management interfered in his work despite the fact that they had no musical expertise or knowledge. All understood he was referring to General Director Iksanov, a career bureaucrat. Some critics have sniped that they suspect Iskanov doesn’t actually like opera or ballet.

Although the ballet remains at a very high standard, the Bolshoi’s opera is stuck in the past, said Raymond Stults, a music critic at The Moscow Times who is writing a history of the Bolshoi Theater.

Vedernikov said that the Bolshoi had yet to turn itself into a world class contemporary theater. It has too many performances compared to other opera houses and not enough premieres. He also complained that the Bolshoi had an enormous staff—2000 compared to 800 at La Scala.

The Bolshoi has never been immune to grand exits and entrances, and not just on the stage. In 1995, dancers refused to come out on stage in protest against the dictatorial style of the then chief choreographer. One sarcastic question asked of Vedernikov when he left was, “Is the only way to leave the Bolshoi without a scandal to go feet first?”

For its part, the Bolshoi has brushed off Vedernikov’s departure, saying he had done all he could in his nine years at the theater, and that scandals were nothing new.

“There was a period in the life of the Bolshoi Theater when the chief conductor, Melik-Pashayev, and the chief director, [Boris] Pokrovsky, refused their posts,” Iksanov said, referring to the 1950s and 1960s, “Boris Alexandrovich Pokrovsky said in one of his interviews that the main thing at the Bolshoi is who today puts on this or that spectacle.”

Vedernikov also drew attention to shortcomings in the reconstruction work before the Audit Chamber’s report was publicized.

No one argues that the Bolshoi did not need work, but many fear that the end result, no matter how much money is spent, will not be worth it.

the bolshoi theatre was founded in 1776, more than 40 years after the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Overshadowed in tsarist times by its elder sibling up north, the Bolshoi only gained its international renown in Soviet times, after Moscow became the capital.

The first building burned down in 1805, in one of the regular conflagrations that torched the city. The current building, designed by Osip Bove (who oversaw the repairs of Moscow after the great, Napoleonic fire of 1812) and Andrei Mikhalkov, was completed in 1824. The first performance took place on January 18, 1825.  The building was again damaged in fire in 1853, requiring three years of repairs and reconstruction; construction of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s undermined the foundations; and during World War II, a bomb did further damage.

Apart from structural repairs, the Bolshoi, despite its stellar artistic reputation, has a dismal reputation for acoustics.

Soviet-era renovations were blamed for destroying a once pure sound. Concrete was used to fill in part of the orchestra pit, formerly an elm wood platform that worked as a soundboard, the wooden ceiling was muted, and the wooden floor was given a concrete foundation.

“Both the soloists and the chorus have to move downstage,” said Vyacheslav Yefimov, associate director general of the Bolshoi, “because the audience will not hear them should they sing upstage.”

“They came to realize the scale of the damage only much later, when quite literally things were in concrete,” Yefimov said. The damage was done, he said, not due to barbarism but to a lack of knowledge and a series of emergencies that forced such repairs.

The theatre could never play Wagner or some of Richard Strauss, because the orchestra pit was too small, Yefimov said.

The purpose of the present renovation was to restore “the legendary and largely lost original acoustics.”

To that end, the German firm Müller-BBM, considered one of the best in its field, was put in charge of the acoustic rehabilitation of the Bolshoi. At the Bayerisch Opera, the company gives recommendations on the acoustics before every performance. But, according to Vedernikov, Müller-BBM was replaced by a Russian company, NII Stroyfiziki, whose work is notorious in Moscow.

“It is far more important how the work is done than when it is done,” Vedernikov said, citing the recently opened Dom Muzyki (“House of Music”) concert hall and the New Bolshoi Theater as two recent examples of botched acoustics jobs, both completed by the Russian firm that replaced Müller. “There aren’t any acoustics,” Vedernikov said of the two halls.

Meanwhile, preservationists fear for the building. They know that when an old building in Moscow is covered, hidden behind advertising billboards, it is often a sign that it will be knocked down or have its historical authenticity sapped.

“The monument has suffered great losses,” Andrei Batalov, deputy director of the Kremlin Museum Complex, told Russian television, “I don’t know what is going on inside, but, judging from what I have seen, I think that there is very little of anything genuine left there. They dealt with it like new construction and not like a historical monument.”

The Moscow Society for Architectural Preservation placed the Bolshoi Theater on its “under threat” list earlier this year, saying that because such problems could “affect a building of such importance, this is evidence of a severe crisis in heritage management.”

The Moscow city government, which has overseen the destruction of hundreds of historical buildings over the last 15 years (see Russian Life, Mar/Apr 2007) as real estate prices have boomed, initially had no role in the theater’s reconstruction. But now Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is a member of a new working group—a move that has many worried.

In the past, the city has been criticized for getting construction work done quickly by ignoring the exacting demands of historical preservation and restoration. Preservationists point to the Central Manezh Exhibition Hall, which
was gutted by fire in 2004 and then rebuilt wholesale, not restored, less than a year after the blaze.

Iksanov denied that the theater would lose any of its historical authenticity. “A very scrupulous, restoration work is going on,” he said. “The reconstruction is linked to the stage area. It is out of date and there will be new equipment. As for the audience area, the audience hall, there is a strict, scientific restoration. Everything is being returned to the 1856 period.”

Meanwhile, like it or not, the Kremlin is involved in the embezzlement investigation at the theater. Deputy head of the presidential administration, Alexander Beglov, was put in charge of all reconstruction oversight work last May. And, according to a Kremlin source, who spoke to Russian news agencies, the work is now “under the constant control of the head of the commission. Beglov regularly reports about it personally to the president.”

Music critic Stults, meanwhile, recalled an interview with a Bolshoi ballerina, who said, a few years ago, “Finally the management realizes that it’s not about them, it’s not about the building, it’s about us.”

At the moment, however, it is all about the building. RL

MOVEABLE THEATER: When the Bolshoi burned down in 1805, its performances moved to Pashkov House, which stands on a hill opposite the Kremlin, then, in 1808, to a theater in the Arbat, which itself burned down in 1812. In 1825, the company moved back to its home on Teatralnaya square.

NOT ALWAYS BOLSHOI: When the Bolshoi was founded, it was originally known as the Petrovsky Theater. Its first actors were serfs and its musicians were ransomed from punishment.