Peter Sellars’ `The Gambler’ Triumphs at Salzburg Festival

SALZBURG, Austria (AP) — Offbeat operas have been some of the Salzburg Festival’s best moments in recent years, the latest being a colorful and entertaining staging of Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Gambler,” directed by Peter Sellars.

Soprano Asmik Grigorian starring as Polina and tenor Sean Panikkar as Alexei led the 125-minute performance, which was met with enthusiastic applause on its opening night. The show took place at the Felsenreitschule, a theater known for its appearance in the 1965 film “The Sound of Music.”

Seven large roulette wheels that also served as chandeliers rose and fell throughout the performance, giving the set a unique look. The theater’s walls were adorned with green moss and archways filled with broken mirrors, creating an interesting visual designed by George Tsypin.

“The mountain is just exploding with sonic energy,” Sellars commented on the theater’s unique acoustics.

Lighting designer James F. Ingalls used a variety of lamps to create rich lighting in reds, greens, purples, and yellows, reminiscent of works by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese.

“It’s something I needed to get used to,” Grigorian admitted. “The lights are really very strong, but in a few days you get used to it.” Grigorian’s outfit, designed by Camille Assaf, emphasized the theme. Playing the stepdaughter of the debt-ridden General, she wore jeans and a T-shirt reading: “PATH CHOSEN — ALL OR NOTHING.”

“The gambler is like an emblematic figure of our time,” said festival artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser. “We are surrounded by gamblers playing with our existence, climate, and economy.”

Scenes in the opera merge into one another seamlessly. Panikkar, an American from Pennsylvania, played the tutor and Polina’s would-be lover. During early rehearsals, his imprecise diction in Russian incited laughter from Grigorian.

“It suddenly became some bad words in Russian,” she joked.

Even as Panikkar improved his pronunciation, memories of the early rehearsals continued to make them laugh as the opening night approached.

“When I’m staring into her eyes in a dramatic moment and I say this, it just made her crack up,” Panikkar recalled with amusement.

Among the updates Sellars made to the original libretto, which Prokofiev adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel, was changing “telegram” to “email” in the on-stage English titles.

Set in the mythical German resort town of Roulettenberg, Polina is in debt to the Marquis and enlists Alexei’s help as part of a climate-change protest. The General, now portrayed as a corrupt government contractor, awaits the death of a wealthy grandmother who arrives at the casino only to lose her fortune. When Alexei wins enough to pay off Polina’s debt, she rejects him and returns to a former lover. The opera ends with Alexei collapsing and exclaiming: “Red came up 20 times in a row!”

Panikkar said the opera’s theme of addiction resonated with him. “I have family members who dealt with gambling addiction. Everybody has someone they can relate to who struggles with various addictions,” he shared.

Sellars wrote his undergraduate thesis at Harvard on Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was to direct the opera’s premiere in 1917 before it was postponed due to the Bolshevik Revolution. It didn’t premiere until 1929 in Brussels and had its Russian premiere in 1974, years after Prokofiev’s death.

“Economics, politics, and the erotic elements were censored,” Sellars explained. “It was presented as a Soviet opera made out of steel, but not very sensual.”

There are five additional performances scheduled, and a stream will be available on Medici.tv starting Aug. 24.

Hinterhäuser also programmed well-received productions of Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Greek Passion” last summer and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s “The Idiot” this season. Russian culture is prominent at the festival, with Timur Zangiev conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in “The Gambler” and Nina Khrushcheva giving the keynote speech. Teodor Currentzis is also conducting a revival of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

While condemning Russia’s government and the invasion of Ukraine, Khrushcheva argued against cultural cancellation.

Hinterhäuser noted, “Since 2 1/2 years I’ve had to explain why I don’t ban every Russian artist from the festival. This is something which didn’t exist a few years ago, and it’s due to the power of social media now.”

Source: AP