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The Glory of Russia: More Sounds Than Sights
St. Petersburg drowns in Opera at the Newport Beach Film Festival
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With a big title like “The Glory of Russia: Sights and Sounds from St. Petersburg,” the film directed by Brian Large promises to offer the music, architecture and landscapes of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The film itself falls short of these promises, offering very little of the city’s sights, deceiving an untraveled viewer into thinking that St. Petersburg is made up of simply several canals, palaces and the ornate Church on Spilt Blood. In reality, the city itself has so much more to offer.
The missing sights in the film are replaced by long expanses of operatic performance. Renee Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, under the direction of Constantine Orbelian, do an exquisite job of singing some of the most well known excerpts of Italian and Russia opera. Fleming and Hvorostovsky perform operatic duets and arias by Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Thomas, and Bellini, as well as romance by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, hopping around from one Russian ballroom to the next.
While the music is a saving grace, the performances are the main, if not only, focus of the film, which very well could have been filmed in any other ballroom across the world.
While Fleming’s operatic voice has made her America’s “Queen of Opera,” her tour guide voice is not necessarily suited to guiding us around St. Petersburg, whether it is the difficult pronunciation of the names of Russian composers or remembering the facts of the Russian empire’s ancient capital.
In the end, the film would have done better as an international rendition of the Met’s “Live in HD” screenings, with a Russian twist. As someone who’s been there several times, I know that St. Petersburg’s sights and sounds are not limited to palaces and operatic performances, but rather include great works of art, ballet, old unknown buildings, the sounds of the subway arriving, the creak of the bridges opening over the Neva river in the middle of the night and the people chatting away on the streets.
“The Glory of Russia” provides only a miniscule glimpse of this magnificent city, overshadowed by extensive, but certainly brilliant, operatic performances. Perhaps, with a different title, the film could enjoy much more success.