Witch hunt

The Enchantress, ninth of the composer’s 11 operas, premiered in 1887 at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg. A convoluted four-act 15th century historical epic, it hasn’t had nearly the international impact as the work that followed it, 1890’s Pikovaya Dama.

Grigorian who is rumored to be making her Met debut in 2021-22 as Jenny in Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny has been earning raves in recent years with a number of high-profile successes. At the Salzburg Festival she starred both in Romeo Castellucci’s controversial Salome and the premiere of William Kentridge’s Wozzeck (which arrived this season at the Met) opposite Matthias Goerne.

Grigorian also bewitched Klaus Florian Vogt last year in La Scala’s Die Tote Stadt which was reviewed here by Michael Anthonio.

Her wide repertoire also includes Madama Butterfly, Manon Lescaut and Fedora, and in 2010 at her then-home theater in Riga she performed the tour-de-force feat of doing all three heroines of Puccini’s Il Trittico.

Grigorian is the daughter of famed Armenian tenor Gegam Grigorian who died in 2016 at age 65. His brief Met career included Gherman in Leonie Rysanek’s farewell Pikovaya Dama in 1996 and six years later Pierre in the house premiere of Prokofiev’s War and Peace which saw the debuts of Anna Netrebko, Ekaterina Semenchuk and Evgeny Nikitin.

The London Jenufa produced by Claus Guth will co-star Karita Mattila, Pavel Cernoch and Allan Clayton and be conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. It promises to be one of the year’s highlights.

Tchaikovsky: Charodeyka (The Enchantress)

Theater an der Wien
September 2014

Broadcast

Nastasja — Asmik Grigorian
Eupraxia Romanovna — Agnes Zwierko
Nenila — Hanna Schwarz
Kurljatew — Johannes Martin Kränzle
Balakin — Erik Årman
Kitschiga — Nikolay Didenko
Paisi — Andreas Conrad
Nikita Danilych Kurlyatev — Maxim Aksenov
Foka – Martin Snell
Mamyrov – Vladimir Ognovenko

Arnold Schönberg Chor
ORF Radiosymfonie Orchester Wien

Conductor — Mikhail Tatarnikov

The Enchantress can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a square with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

On previous Trove Thursdays, Asmik appears in Rubinstein’s Demon opposite Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and Gegam Grigorian can be heard in another Tchaikovsky offering, Iolanta.

In addition, over 300 other podcast tracks are always available from Apple Podcasts and iTunes for free, or via any RSS reader.

The archive listing all Trove Thursday offerings in alphabetical order by composer has been updated to include all material as of late February 2020.