Posted January 12, 2018

While it is not Wagner, it is opera and WSNC Member Rick Bogart has spear headed this project : For Valhalla Productions, I am proud and excited to announce the opening next week of a unique operatic double bill. In collaboration with Island City Opera of Alameda, we are presenting two seldom-heard one-act operas by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, “Mozart and Salieri” and “Kashchey, the Immortal”.

Amazingly, this will be the American premiere of “Kashchey” (though written in 1902 and often performed in Russia)! “Kashchey” will be performed in Russian (with titles of course), with a specially commissioned orchestral arrangement by Francis Griffin, who also prepared the arrangements for Valhalla Productions’ presentations of Die Walküre and Siegfried.
 
“Mozart and Salieri” will be performed in an original English translation by me and the conductor, Lidiya Yankovskaya.
 
There will be a total of four performances, Jan 19, 21, 26, and 28, along with a reduced-price preview performance of an open dress rehearsal on Jan 17. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit http://islandcityopera.org/  I hope you can make it!
Cheers, Rick Bogart 
 
for tickets visit: http://islandcityopera.org/
 
​Additional comments from Rick Bogart:
It’s not Wagner, but it is sure Wagner-inspired. The story has a lot of echoes of Parsifal, there’s a love duet that sounds like it could have come out of Tristan. Rimsky-Korsakov himself wrote that he derived the harmonic inspiration for some of the leading leitmotifs from the Wanderer/Alberich scene in Siegfried!