Germany

chamber installation-opera

2023

Notes from the Underground

russia

chamber opera

2021

video

/opinion

description

/concept

Premiered on 23 April 2021 at the Theatre of Nations, Moscow, within the “Dostoevsky 200” program, Notes from the Underground reduces Dostoevsky’s novella to a concentrated, dream-like mechanism. Performed by Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble and a contemporary vocal quartet N’Caged, the 27-minute work is built in five sections: Prologue, two Conversations, an Interlude, and a Finale of four quartets.

The libretto by Oleg Krokhalev isolates the encounters between the Underground Man and Liza, the prostitute who becomes the target of his calculated moral cruelty. Their relationship unfolds not as a plot, but as a fixed gravitational pull — a cold orbit in which darkness and light cancel each other. Fragments from the novella’s first, manifesto-like part drift through the work, circling the dialogue like snow in an unbroken wind, interrupted only by terse weather descriptions.

Two singers — bass and soprano — carry the dialogue, shadowed by an alto and tenor who remain outside the narrative, collecting and refracting its words. The ensemble — flute, clarinet, detuned electric guitar, piano, violin, cello, percussion — follows the voices with an exact, linear motion toward erasure. In the Finale, the instruments fall silent, replaced by small DIY machines producing a narrow band of mechanical noise, as if the human presence has already been withdrawn.

reviews

/opinion

The premiere was met with immediate critical attention, named by the Theatre of Nations as the most significant production of the 2020–2021 season by the Golden Mask Festival’s expert council.

— Theatre of Nations

The main event of the project is the filigree work of the Krokhalev/Betekhtin tandem with the great Arina Zvereva — immediately placing Oleg among the forefront of new Russian composers, opening completely unexpected, ‘post-SoMa’ horizons.

— Dmitry Renansky, music critic, Facebook post, 26 April 2021

Oleg Krokhalev removed from the source the heavy layer of tragedy and pain, replacing them with a fragile, dotted sound geometry that clears space for the dispassionate monologues and conversations… Emptiness seemed more important than words, literally expelling the characters somewhere where ‘snow was falling quietly and evenly.

— Elena Cheremnych (Musical Life Magazine)

The opera Notes from the Underground as the highest degree of vulnerability and the inability to face the crudity and violence of the external world […] translated Dostoevsky’s tense empathy into a mode of new sincerity. Oleg Krokhalev seemed to have woven from ice a thinning shawl […] the touch of reality can destroy this fabric, woven from polyphonic text–musical layers. The ringing sonic fabric of the high registers, interlaced with a slightly itching cello, the trembling glints of phoneme-stars in the soprano […] gradually all stratifies in the general ripple of microphone feedback and the flutter of four small motors, reminiscent in effect of tapping a pencil on the walls of a mug. The composer himself says that such a dissolution of perpetrator and victim is quite a comforting way out of violence: all tension between the characters dissipates into space. The precise directorial solutions of Nikita Betekhtin and video artist Mikhail Zaikanov […] the frozen mise-en-scènes and, in the finale, the letters from the lines of the novel scattering across the walls, complete this intimate, confidential story.

— Tatjana Yakovleva, reMusik.org

motors

/opinion

The staging was stripped to essentials: a single chair, shifting word clouds projected onto the back wall to announce each section, and in the Interlude, a slow street-light reflection moving across faces in near darkness.

For me, this opera became a point of arrival — a work where most of my earlier explorations met, merged, and found their form.

gallery

/opinion