The Fiddler at the Wedding

Vadim Borisovich Rivkin joined "Khor Domashniy" in 2003 and proved a very valuable acquisition. Not only is he a wonderful singer and a cultured, kind person, he is also a talented composer.

The history of his operas began in the late 1990s. Then the composer wrote three one-act operas based on works by Sholem Aleichem for the children's theatre studio “Kinder-Yorn” (Childhood), which grew up at the Jewish Community Centre of Saint Petersburg. By the age of seventy Vadim Borisovich had composed eight operas and musicals, and nine with the pre-opera “On the Trubetskoy Spit”. The Saint Petersburg poet and playwright Nikolai Gol wrote the libretto for all the operas except two. But only the "animal" musical “Ludwig and Tutta” has had a comparatively long stage life. Since 2000 it has been playing at the Saint Petersburg theatre “Zazerkalye” and for five years now in Moscow on the small stage of the Natalia Sats Theatre.

The second production of our Theatre was the opera "The Fiddler at the Wedding" after works by Sholem Aleichem. The show lasted 40 minutes and included plots and music from two of Rivkin's works: “Hello, Buzya” and “The Fiddler at the Wedding”. For the first time the company faced learning harmonically complex musical phrases. People grumbled, but worked. And managed! Combining two different plots made it possible to mix genres: the fairy tale ("Buzya") and the realities of life in a Jewish shtetl ("The Fiddler"). A large number of children took part in the fairy-tale scenes. They eagerly played forest robbers. The children, as it happens, felt no harmonic difficulties at all and happily performed the magical (in every sense) music.