Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Tchaikovsky: Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades)

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Pique Dame is the name the Germans give to the opera called in English, The Queen of Spades (1890), the next-to-last of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ten operas. When they first saw it staged, the music critics of St. Petersburg and Moscow thought the opera was boring, but they have long since been overruled. How they could have arrived at that opinion is hard to understand, since there is no lack of passion in either Tchaikovsky's music or the libretto he and his brother Modest worked up from Pushkin's novella.

In Tchaikovsly's operatic version of the story the young military man, Herman, is not simply a cold-hearted, monomaniacal cardshark. There is also an element of the ghost story in The Queen of Spades, i.e. the dead countess, and that lends this opera its Halloween-tide application for broadcast today. I last presented Pique Dame on Sunday, April 7,1991, in a centennial production by the Bulgarian State Opera, as recorded for release on Sony Classical CDs.

The opera was recorded again in 2014 for the German BR Klassik label, the proprietary label of Bavarian Radio. Mariss Jansons conducts the Radio Chorus and Radio Symphony Orchestra. Tenor Mischa Didyk portrays Herman in the concert hall recording. His intense interpretation of the role received high marks from record critic Daniel Morrison, writing for Fanfare magazine (May/June 2016 issue). Citing splendid work by chorus, orchestra and most of the supporting cast, plus excellent sound quality, Morrison says that overall "the new Bavarian Radio release deserves a place among the recommended recordings of this great opera."