Commissioned and written as a double bill, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and The Nutcracker, his final opera and ballet, were premiered together in St Petersburg in 1892. Iolanta was deemed the finer score at the time, and the two works soon parted company: Nutcracker only became popular after the first world war, the point when Iolanta began to fall from favour, temporarily as it turned out. Performances of the two together remain rare, however, though Matthew Bourne’s now famous Nutcracker! had its origins in a 1992 collaboration with Opera North, and Dmitri Tcherniakov staged both works in Paris in 2016 with profoundly mixed results.
Vassily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, meanwhile, have now also revisited the original pairing, albeit not in its entirety, by prefacing a semi-staging of Iolanta by Denni Sayers with a concert performance of Nutcracker’s second act. Petrenko shaped the latter with considerable refinement and the playing, all smooth strings, warm brass and elegant woodwind, often seemed little short of sumptuous, even if points of orchestral detail were swallowed in the fullness of the textures. Speeds sometimes diverged from what would be danceable in the theatre, with a hectic Trepak and a slow, albeit very sensuous pas de deux. The noisy admission of latecomers, meanwhile, wellnigh ruined the Danse Arabe, the quietest section of the score.
Iolanta, with its blind heroine yearning for love, sight and the light of God, is an altogether more troubling work than Nutcracker, and Petrenko admirably captured its melancholy ambiguities as the woodwind darkness of the prelude – acrid oboes and bassoons, murky clarinet phrases – gradually gave way to brightness of texture and clarity of sound. This was in many ways a lovely performance, drawing you in with its slowly gathering tensions, though the decision to amplify the soloists was both unfortunate and unnecessary, resulting in an unnatural voice-orchestra balance with the singers simply too prominent in places – a shame, as the cast was often extremely fine.
Maria Motolygina made a deeply touching Iolanta, sung with meltingly lovely tone and real sense of rapture in the final scenes. The Ukrainian bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk was equally moving as her father René, gradually coming to understand the disastrous consequences of his misguided attempts to shelter his daughter from reality. Ashley Riches was unwell and sang with an apology as Ibn-Hakia, the Muslim doctor who effects Iolanta’s cure, though Alexey Dolgov made a suitably ardent Vaudémont and Andrei Kymach was swaggeringly attractive as Robert. The Philharmonia Chorus sang with admirable focus. Sayers’s semi-staging, meanwhile, was simple, effective and admirably clear.
