The Hot Name in Set Design

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The New York Sun

Directors become brand names in opera. Set designers don’t. And thus it happens that the Russian-born Brooklyn resident George Tsypin is hiding in plain sight. His handiwork increasingly dominates the stage, but who knows his name? Even when his briefly unrevolving wall put Elliot Goldenthal’s new “Grendel” in the headlines (and kept it there, from the delayed Los Angeles premiere to its trouble-free opening at the Lincoln Center Festival), the talking head everyone went to was Julie Taymor, the director.

This week, Lincoln Center has another mammoth production of Mr. Tsypin’s on its hands.A tale of attempted escape from a harem, Mozart’s “Zaide” is one of several operatic fragments that are being dusted off around the world in honor of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Mostly the unfinished score is remembered, if at all, for the aria “Ruhe sanft” (“May your slumbers be gentle”), which unfurls like a silken ribbon in heaven. But between August 9 and 12, the Mostly Mozart Festival presents the score embedded in what the critic Larry L. Lash has described in “Opera News” as “a lecture about the evils of current-day slavery practices.” (He was reporting on the May premiere, in Vienna.)

The director in charge is Peter Sellars, who has made a custom of projecting the evils of the world we live in onto art from the past. A pertinent, recent example: the 25-century-old relic “The Children of Hercules,” by Euripides, which deals with the collapse of empire and the Diaspora of refugees. The production toured widely; wherever it went, Mr. Sellars filled out the ranks of the cast with young locals who had their own tales to tell of displacement and persecution.

The house Mr. Tsypin has built for “Zaide,” in Mr. Lash’s account, is a “gargantuan, hyper-realistic sweatshop,” which at a glance foretells “a loud and ugly evening.” (Don’t let the prediction scare you. The critic’s string of adjectives for the musicians begins with “magnificent” and ends with “gorgeous.”)

Though Mr. Tsypin can work with exquisite delicacy and restraint, his bestknown specialty is theatrical machinery at its heaviest. A sculptor and architect as well as theatrical set designer, he would not object to that description. A coffee-table book from Princeton Architectural Press, published last year, put industrial language right up there in the title: “George Tsypin Opera Factory: Building in the Black Void.”

Whether or not they remember the contractor, audiences at the Metropolitan Opera do know his work. Since 2001, Mr. Tsypin has built five shows there, each for a different director. His first champion at the house was the Met’s principal guest conductor, Valery Gergiev, who is also artistic and general director of the Mariinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Three of Mr. Tyspin’s Met collaborations with Mr. Gergiev have been house premieres of Russian repertoire.

First came Prokofiev’s “The Gambler” (directed by Temur Chkheidze), which hovers in memory as a mirage of potted palms and Plexiglas. Next was the same composer’s “War and Peace” (directed by Andrei Konchalovsky), which placed Tolstoy’s epic action on a revolving dome signifying the globe. Third in the series was Tchaikovsky’s “Mazeppa” (directed by Yuri Alexandrov), conceived as a nightmare of history from which a viewer struggled to awaken: Visual quotes jumbled the First Emperor’s China with Stalin’s Soviet Union and the Rome of the Caesars, harping on the theme of totalitarianism through the ages.I don’t think it worked, but Mr. Tsypin’s solution for the orchestral intermezzo evoking the 18th-century Battle of Poltava was a stroke of genius. On the huge, open stage, under lightly falling snow, stood a few forlorn terra cotta soldiers out of the famous tomb at Xi’an; as the battle raged, the stage floor tipped toward the audience like a giant trap door. As it went up, the lengthening shadows of the statues released a sudden wave of panic; and when it went down, the wave hit again.

At moments like these — and not for the first or second time — Mr. Tsypin crosses the line from the handmaidenly craft of set design to the autocratic realm of installation art. Another example: his show for the world premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” (“Love from Afar”) in Salzburg. It played at the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg, a 17th-century equestrian showcase where three rows of arcades are cut into living rock. In the vast arena, Mr. Tsypin installed just two little glass towers, one for each distant lover. As they scrambled up and down their spiral staircases, their turrets turned clockwise and counterclockwise, keeping them always in view.

But the story says that they love across a sea, and that was there, too, revealed only as the third character — a late-arriving pilgrim — waded across the flooded stage, making ripples that cast magical reflections across the carved face of the cliff.The hero’s death scene dragged, I thought, but no matter. Watching the waves was enough.

In “Grendel,” there was no end of things to see: a carnival dragon, for starters, not to mention the queen’s ship sailing blissfully in midair. And the notorious wall? Just one cog in a fantastic theatrical machine, meshing grandly with others, large and small. Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Met, another Julie Taymor production, is as rich but more rigorous. A single construction occupies the stage throughout: a mirrored cube (yes, it revolves) chockablock with alchemical allusion. Magic as these constructions are, they never upstage the action they are meant to serve.

And we have by no means seen the last of Mr. Tsypin. The centerpiece of next summer’s Lincoln Center Festival is the Mariinsky Theater’s production of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” localized at the feet of impassive, looming deities perhaps 30 feet tall. For those shut out of the four-evening cycle (already availability is said to be limited), daytime tours of the set, with an artistic wash of son et lumière, could be quite the attraction. If so, maybe next year we’ll be seeing the name Tsypin on the poster in type as big as his vision.

August 9, 11, and 12 (Rose Theater, Broadway at 60th Street, 212-721-6500).


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