Much-spoken-of Benjamin Britten’s opera Midsummer Night’s Dream premiered on June 10 in the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich Danchenko Music Theatre in triumph.

      The Midsummer Night’s Dream is a joint staging by one of the leading musical theatres of Russia and the famed English National Opera. The Moscow premiere was prepared by Russian soloists and choir and the English team including the stage director Christopher Olden, conductor William Lacey and artist Charles Edwards.

      “It is a serious, sombre, and hard opera focused on the important topic of relations between adults and children” – Christopher Olden says. He chose to set the opera in a grim grey building of a school that looks more like a prison instead of Shakespearean fairy forest.

      The opera received great ovations, which set the record straight in the scandalous story that had been inflated because of an anonymous letter accusing the theatre of advocating pedophilia and homosexuality. Expert council established by the Russian Culture Ministry refuted the anonymous allegations as well.

      Source: www.ria.ru