British musical life has been far too busy trying to convince itself that Vaughan Williams was a great composer to engage with this year's other significant anniversary. So it was left to the Mariinsky theatre to mark the centenary of the death of Rimsky-Korsakov with two performances of one of the most opulent and richly coloured of his stage works, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, based upon a Pushkin poem.
The folk tale on which it is based is a strange mix of Cinderella and Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale - complete with a swan-princess, a city that rises out of the sea, and a magic squirrel that finds emeralds in acorns - but dramatically it's not one of Rimsky's greatest operas. First performed in 1900, Tsar Saltan lacks the psychological depth of Snow Maiden, the sardonic edge of Golden Cockerel or the outstandingly inventive score of The Invisible City of Kitezh.
The tsar of the title may have his wife and newborn son cast out to sea in a barrel in the first act, only for all to be reunited for the inevitable happy ending, but real emotions are studiously avoided and the result is more pageant than drama, a series of tableaux which unrolls like a Russian tapestry and to which the folk-inflected music adds a gorgeously decorative backdrop.
The Mariinsky production is purely illustrative, too. The staging by Alexander Petrov may only be three years old, but the lavish painted sets are recreations of those for a 1937 St Petersburg production based on designs by the illustrator Ivan Bilibin, and the acting style is impossibly arch. No other opera company could get away with such a museum piece, but the Mariinsky has never been embarrassed by anachronisms, and musically it was all gorgeously played and decently sung.
There were none of the company's stars on show in this cast, but no weak links either. Victoria Yastrebova was the pick of the cast as the Tsaritsa, though she was closely rivalled by Lyudmila Dudinova as the Swan-Princess. The leading men - Alexey Tanovitsky as the Tsar, Daniil Shtoda as his grown-up son Guidon - were efficient enough without ever being outstanding. Tugan Sokhiev and the orchestra were the real stars of the evening, delivering Rimsky's glittering orchestral sonorities (including The Flight of the Bumble Bee, heard in situ for once) with panache, making the show hugely enjoyable.
