"Today a unique miracle is happening in our opera house. Right now, there are people from at least five different nations gathered in the hall to create this spectacle. We have artists from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria and China." This is what the director Vera Petrova said on the upcoming premiere of "The Queen of Spades" at the Sofia Opera.
"The miracle is that we come together and find common ground at a time when the world is a very uncertain place for all of us. And this is due to one man – academician Plamen Kartaloff, who brought us all together in this project," she said further.
The costumes in the spectacle are developed in two groups, each of them carrying its own emotionality, not only of character, told Hristiana Mihaleva – author of the costumes. "I'm chasing a surreal flavour and it's with this approach that I'm trying to achieve this effect – of malevolence. The chorus will be like metal puppets, which, apart from the flamboyance, will also give a malevolence," she added. There are also a few masks.
"Basically, I move in a fairy tale world, in a dream world, and with all my soul I feel the fantastic, and something profound. One rarely feels this way, for which I am very grateful," commented Hristiana Mihaleva.
As BTA reported, the premiere of "The Queen of Spades" is on 18 November. The next performances are on 19, 20 and 22 November. Dostoyevsky described "The Queen of Spades" as "the pinnacle in the art of the fantastic." Adaptations, screen adaptations and works of various arts inspired by Pushkin's novel "The Queen of Spades" began appearing immediately after the work's publication. These include Tchaikovsky's opera of the same name (1890 was the first production of the opera), the three operas that remain less well-known, the first screen adaptations that appeared during the silent film era, and the 1949 British screen adaptation that Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese have described as a true classic.