MOSCOW (AP) -- The former artistic director of Russia' s Bolshoi Theater
said Sunday that problems with a new production and the defections of key
singers led to his resignation from the 225-year-old theater.
Renowned conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who quit last week after one
season, said his singers kept deserting rehearsals for better-paying jobs
abroad. "It's impossible to condemn these people," he said on TV-6
television's Itogi program. "They want to eat."
But the defections prevented him and the troupe from properly preparing the
premier of his production of Prokofiev's opera "The Gambler," he said. He
also cited critical attacks from the Moscow press as a reason for stepping
down, and called it "strange" that Bolshoi executive director Anatoly
Iksanov did not attend a single rehearsal for the new production.
Rozhdestvensky was appointed to the post in a shake-up last fall, when
President Vladimir Putin placed the ballet and opera theater under direct
control of the Ministry of Culture.
The ministry sacked the theater's then artistic and general director,
Vladimir Vasilyev, and divided his position between Rozhdestvensky and
Iksanov.
Rozhdestvensky expressed regret, saying that he took the job "full of
determination to give the Bolshoi Theater all my strength and knowledge in
order to restore the best traditions of the troupe."
The theater has struggled with financial and administrative woes and what
some have called a lack of artistic focus since the collapse of the
Soviet-era system of support for the arts.
Copyright © 2000 The Associated Press
Paul Moor (Berlin)
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