Despite being billed as an opera, “Russia: Today” has no apparent plot; instead, the material is framed as an hourlong Orthodox memorial service, moving from opening prayers through lamentation to a kind of peace.
“There are many different layers to the piece, just as there are many different layers to Russia,” said Sergej Morozov, the director of “Russia: Today,” by phone. “From outside, we see this political, aggressive layer, but there are different layers hidden underneath.”
Birman himself left Russia with his family when he was six, in 1994, and grew up in San Francisco, before studying in Britain. As much as anything else, “Russia: Today” was an attempt to understand a country he often feels estranged from, he said. “I wanted to find what Russia is, because I didn’t have the answer myself.”
In the version that will be performed in London, five singers are clustered around microphones beneath a screen that shows stark images of the Russian landscape shot by the filmmaker Alexandra Karelina. Snow-swathed railroad tracks and apartment blocks blur into glowering fir forests; vivid green tundra gives way to gray frozen lakes.
We see no people, but we hear voices continually. Sometimes the interview recordings are played straight, or woven into cacophonous layers; other times, the words are declaimed verbatim by the performers, in Russian and English. At moments, Birman molds them into eerie, angular vocal lines. Coloring the score are the sounds of bells, whistling, birdlike cries and the growl of a low bass voice.
Birman’s original idea was to present stagings of the work in Moscow and London. Plans were well advanced until summer 2021, when the singers of a Russian vocal ensemble that had agreed to premiere the piece, took a closer look at the text and pulled out.
Andrew Dickson
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