Bolshoi Theater makes Israel debut
Famous Moscow opera performs 'Yevgeny Onegin,' one of its flagship repertoire shows, in Holy Land for very first time. Performances sold out months in advance
Bringing over 300 artists from the Bolshoi to perform in Tel Aviv has been quite the undertaking, admits the opera’s manager, Hanna Munitz, however to have the Bolshoi come for the first time to Israel to sold out performance was well worth the effort.
Video courtesy of jn1.tv
“It's an historic event," Munitz says. "When I approached them and I spoke to the director general of the Bolshoi Opera he immediately said yes, and immediately we thought about 'Yevgeny Onegin.'
For Soprano Tatiana Monogarova, it is the second time in Israel but the first time she is actually performing at the Israeli Opera House.
"It's the second time I'm in Tel Aviv and I'm extremely happy," Monogarova says. "The audience is charming, warm, intelligent, and we are very very pleased. A beautiful world and a beautiful sea, we are simply charmed by the beauty of these places and the Holy Land. We are very happy and ecstatic that we are here.
"It's a tremendous feeling of happiness, personally and artistically speaking. Therefore, whatever difficulties a person is faced with, he must always thank God that such process exists that allows you to move on, to develop and to constantly keep thinking about it. It's a huge sense of happiness.”
No opera tradition in Israel
Munitz says that although the Jewish people don’t really have an opera tradition, she and her staff are working overtime to change that.
“This country is only 64 years old, and in fact even before the country was formed, we already had an opera in Israel, but it's not in our tradition like instrumentalists. A Jewish mother will not dream of her son to become an opera singer, she will want him to become an instrumentalist; violin player, a pianist, but definitely not a singer.
"But now that we have the opera in Israel and this became a profession, more and more young people, Israelis, not Russian necessarily, want to sing because it's a profession that they can come and work in the opera."
All the Bolshoi performances were sold out months in advance, but the manager has promised to bring the opera back to Israel in 2015.
