Works by Chekhov, Medtner and Other Russians
By • April 3, 2025 0 343
Ivan Petrovich Voinitsky is having a moment.
Steve Carell took him on last spring in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Lila Neugebauer. In Greenwich Village at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, Irish actor Andrew Scott is portraying not only playwright Anton Chekhov’s supremely frustrated bachelor but everyone else at the faded country estate where he keeps the books with his lovelorn niece, who calls him, affectionately, Uncle Vanya.
That one-man show — adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates — closes on May 11. But you only have until April 20 to catch “Uncle Vanya” here in Washington, D.C., where Shakespeare Theatre Company is presenting Conor McPherson’s adaptation in Harman Hall, 510 F St. NW.
Appearing as Vanya: Hugh Bonneville, who played Lord Grantham in “Downtown Abbey.” Also in the cast are Melanie Field as Vanya’s niece Sonya, Tom Nelis as her household-disrupting father, Ito Aghayere as his much-younger second wife, John Benjamin Hickey as a visiting doctor (a stand-in for Chekhov, who practiced medicine), Sharon Lockwood as Vanya’s mother, Nancy Robinette as the elderly nanny and Craig Wallace as a guitar-strumming hanger-on called Waffles (Vaflya) for his complexion. Ensemble member Kina Kantor provides solo cello interludes.
Directed by STC’s Simon Godwin, the co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, which presented it in February and March, was acclaimed by Bay Area critics. In the TheaterDogs blog, Chad Jones described the intentional workshop feel it begins with: “An actor arrives late to the theater on bicycle, stagehands roll costume racks around the stage, other actors chat with audience members or go through their pre-show ritual all within full view of the audience.” As the show progresses, it acquires more trappings, but the toying with the “fourth wall” continues.
Perhaps this approach pays tribute to the play’s abandonment of 19th-century theatrical conventions. When the pathbreaking Moscow Art Theatre mounted “Uncle Vanya” in 1899, co-founder Konstantin Stanislavski played the doctor, Mikhail Astrov (though Stanislavski, who developed what later became known as “method acting,” originally wanted to play Vanya). In the role of Sonya’s beautiful stepmother Yelena, who attracts and fends off both the doctor and Vanya, was Olga Knipper, who married Chekhov two years later.
Though he is one of the greatest short-story writers, Chekhov also, with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, laid the groundwork for modern theater, first with “The Seagull,” then with “Uncle Vanya,” “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard.” In these four plays, the settings are naturalistic, the characters complexly human. Not much happens, though a famous principle of Chekhov is that if a gun is shown it must be fired — as (spoiler) one is in “Uncle Vanya.” The Chekhovian tone, tricky to pull off, is bittersweet yet comic.
Born 13 years after Chekhov, in 1873, pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff set part of Sonya’s concluding monologue as a song, one of his “Fifteen Romances” of 1906. The lyrics (in Philip Ross Bullock’s translation): “We shall rest! We shall hear the angels, we shall see the whole sky shining like diamonds, we shall see all the evil of this world, all our sufferings drowned in mercy, which will fill the whole earth, and our life will become as quiet, as tender, as sweet as a caress. That is my belief, my belief … We shall rest … We shall rest.”
Another pianist and composer of the period — known as Russia’s Silver Age, the three or four decades prior to the 1917 Revolution — was Nikolai Medtner, born in Moscow early in 1880 (on Christmas Eve of 1879 per the Julian calendar). A Moscow Conservatory graduate like his friend Rachmaninoff, Medtner toured as a recitalist and in the 1930s settled in London, where he died in 1951.
Neglected for decades, Medtner’s works for piano and for voice have been rediscovered in recent years. On Friday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m., nine of his songs will be sung by soprano Natalie Conte and baritone Anton Belov at a Russian Chamber Art Society concert at the Embassy of France, 4101 Reservoir Road NW.
The Medtner songs come in the program’s second half, the first half being devoted to songs by mid-19th-century nationalist composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with accompaniment by Vera Danchenko-Stern, RCAS founder and artistic director. In addition, pianist Martin Labazevitch will perform three of Medtner’s “Skazki” or “Fairy Tales” — from 1904-5, 1910-12 and 1928 — and “Canzona serenata” from his “Forgotten Melodies” of 1919-22.
Among Medtner’s 21st-century advocates is Moscow-born concert pianist Evgeny Kissin, who will give a recital on Saturday, May 3, at 4 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane in North Bethesda, Maryland. Presented by Washington Performing Arts, Kissin will play works by Frederic Chopin and Dmitri Shostakovich (but not Medtner).
In an interview with Frederic Gaussin, Kissin remarked: “The fact that [Medtner] didn’t make his mark on history like the ‘Greats’ had a huge effect on him. This is regrettable for us today as well. He had so much to say, he had his own style, his own personal language. Medtner was capable of creating truly original pieces.”
