A Dog's Heart

Cesare Mazzonis (R), Martin Pickard (E)

It's a strange story: a surgeon who experiments a lot with people in order to rejuvenate them, an operation in which human organs are implanted into a dog, creating an uncontrollable creature, and a second operation to prevent even more mischief from happening.
An enthusiastic audience in Amsterdam at the Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam, where Raskatov's opera “Dog Heart” premiered with spectacular success on June 7, was able to experience the plot of this subject set to music by Russian composer Alexander Raskatov. The choir of the Dutch Opera, which had commissioned the work, and the Radio Kamer Filharmonie Hilversum under the direction of Martyn Brabbins were the performers in this production, which was sung in Russian. The audience thanked the performers with ovations lasting several minutes. The first-class ensemble of singers, above all Sergei Leiferkus in the role of Professor Preobrazhensky, under the intelligent and witty direction of Simon McBurney, who was not stingy with satirical realism, knew how to delight the audience time and again.
Alexander Raskatov achieved a great success with his first opera ‘Hundeherz’. His music, which radiates lightness and esprit, corresponded perfectly with the grotesque
novel based on the libretto by Cesare Mazzonis. The strong accentuations in the winds and percussion, the rousing tempi and moderately interspersed quotations from Soviet propaganda music showed that the composer is continuing a line of tradition with his ‘Dog's Heart’ that leads from Dmitri Shostakovich's ‘Nose’ to Alfred Schnittke's ‘Life with an Idiot’.