Prokofiev - The Gambler (Wexford, 2026)

Sergei Prokofiev - The Gambler

Wexford Festival Opera, 2026

Valentin Uryupin, Ivan Popovsky, Igor Onishchenko, Sophie Gordeladze, Alexei Botnarciuc, Hilary Ginther, Gavan Ring, Rory Musgrave, Clarry Bartha, Seán Tester, Ross Cumming, Wonsick Oh, Olga Conway

O'Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford - 22nd October 2026

In terms of the general overall theme of the three main stage operas at the Wexford Festival Opera's celebratory 75th anniversary programme as "one for the heart, one for the head and one for fun", Prokofiev's The Gambler is the "one for the head", but I think it's really one for the heart. The head doesn't enter into it when you are dealing with the Russian character as described in Dostoevsky's short novel, nor does it in Prokofiev's stunning translation of it into an exceptional opera. Admittedly though, it's hard to know where the heart lies in it either, except for the fact that it is passionate on every level. 

The word 'passion' is barely sufficient though, as the subject and its treatment go far beyond that. I'm sure there must be a Russian word for it or maybe a German one. Passion in Russian terms (in at least as far as my reading of the 19th century Russian masters is concerned) is more of obsession; an irrational obsession that pushes the individual to their limits and on a road to self-destruction. Russian art and literature is littered with the corpses of its romantic heroes, and they are not just fictional constructs either. Count Leo Tolstoy lived a life of privileged dissolution before his redemption, Tchaikovsky's life is mirrored in the solitary fate of Eugene Onegin, and Pushkin - the author of that work - consumed in scandal and debt himself, died in a tragic duel at a young age. Dostoevsky's life is filled with incident and horror, but he also felt the full force of the gambling addiction that afflicts Alexei and the General's family in his short novel, The Gambler.

In some ways you can also see the Russian nature of Prokofiev himself in this work or at least in how he identifies with an pours himself into the opera, driven to express the madness that possessed the character of Alexei, and not just Alexei, but the General, Polina and all the others - not least the Grandmother - as they become consumed with gambling in the fictional German spa town casino of Roulettenberg - effectively gambling their lives against fate. The music evokes those wild irrational actions and behaviour in bold expression, in dissonance, Prokoviev constantly pushing at the edges of musical sanity. It's extraordinary, the only way to express such behaviours (although to be fair Tchaikovsky does it his own way no less effectively in Eugene Onegin and in The Queen of Spades). Prokofiev takes that kind of expression to an epic level in his War and Peace (1946), and an even wilder extreme in The Fiery Angel (1927), but here in this 1917 work, the musical language has a concentrated intensity.

The 2026 Wexford Festival Opera production directed by Ivan Popovsky does not seek to impose any revisionist or modern perspective on the work, but it is stylised in a way that seems closely related to the qualities of the work. It's not set in the original period and it's not set in the present day but in an abstract world of stark black and white in the set design and costumes. It's an expression of the nature of then work itself; there are no shades of grey here, everything is thrown out into the open, the passions - obsessions and madness - unrestrained; the naked greed, the soul of the Russian headlong rush to self-destruction laid bare. It's a matter of acceptance of that nature, not hiding it, submitting to the inner urge, the reckless idealism of abandoning oneself to the hands of fate no matter where it takes you.

So while Andrei is permanently on the edge of self-destruction, losing everything in the casino, betting everything on another turn of the roulette wheel, it's all with the aim of furthering another obsession to have wealth and be worthy of marrying the General's daughter Polina: it's just one obsession leading to another, or one obsession wrapped up in madness. The outcome is in the hands of fate, all that matters is throwing oneself into it without hesitation or caution. The General and the Marquis both have their own vices and they are depending on fate settling things with the General's Grandmother for them; expecting her ill health and apparently imminent death to provide them with an inheritance to pay off debts and arrange suitable marriages. Fate inevitably takes its own path, as Grandma turns up in Roulettenburg for literally one last throw of the dice.

The monochrome set enhances and reflects these extreme character and behaviour traits out into open display, never mind looking for undercurrents or subtexts. Act II however is content to push that even further ending before the interval with the surreal image of a dark blob oozing out of the casino and getting its grip on Grandma. There are plenty of other tricks in store in the second half's Act III and IV, including red and black ballet dancers spinning as a living roulette wheel and the walls of the set closing in to reflect the almost unbearable intensity of the emotions reaching a fever pitch that is matched in the acrobatics of the score.

You would expect there to be no holding back in the musical performance or the singing and that is evidently what you get in this stunning Wexford production. Prokofiev's score - like all his major operas - is a marvel. There is nothing that even hints of conventionality in its expressionist modernism that is restless, probing and revealing; a soundtrack of the Russian soul. The Wexford orchestra deliver an impressive musical performance under the direction of Valentin Uryupin, Prokofiev's score always keeping you on your toes, taking you by surprise at its twists, turns and crashes.

There is a remarkable performance from Igor Onishchenko here as Alexei. To say this is a challenging role is an understatement, although it's not as if the tenor has any choice in the matter of expression; there are few scenes when he is not on stage and singing at full tilt but Onishchenko - whose biographical notes reveal a high level of experience in all the major Russian operas - has a wonderful timbre and expressive lyrical quality, even in the most extreme edges of the range. 

Onishchenko is matched only by the equally exceptional Sophie Gordeladze as Polina, but really you have to share praise with all the cast, including Alexei Botnarciuc as the General, Hilary Ginther as Blanche, Clarry Bartha as Grandma, Gavan Ring as the Marquis and Rory Musgrave as Mr Astley. The latter two familiar Irish singers seemingly transformed and almost unrecognisable here. That above all demonstrated the essential quality displayed here, all performers clearly fully invested in their characters, in the expression of the opera’s intense treatment of the subject and working with the fine musical performance and stage direction that held it all together. This was a superb production on every level.

The Wexford production of Prokofiev's The Gambler can be currently be viewed from the RTE Lyric FM site.

External links: Wexford Festival Opera, RTE Lyric FM Streaming

Prokofiev - The Gambler (Vienna, 2017)

Sergei Prokofiev - The Gambler

Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna - 2017

Simone Young, Karoline Gruber, Dmitry Ulyanov, Elena Guseva, Linda Watson, Misha Didyk, Thomas Ebenstein, Elena Maximova, Morten Frank Larsen, Pavel Kolgatin, Marcus Pelz, Clemens Unterreiner, Alexandru Moisiuc

Staastoper Live - 7th October 2017

Sergei Prokofiev's desire to write an opera based on Dostoevsky's The Gambler is an interesting one and comes at a significant point in Russian history. The Gambler is a short novella, but it deals with some fundamental Russian characteristics and behavioural traits that Prokofiev converts to the opera form in a stark and original manner. It's as if the composer were exploring the Russian character in a classic piece of literature and experimenting with it in a new form of musical expression. Completed in January 1917 however, Russia was about to embark on its own new direction with the 1917 February Revolution, leaving Prokofiev's opera unperformed and the composer himself soon afterwards going into exile.

The essential tone of The Gambler however is determined by its original author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although it can be read as such, this was no academic study of the Russian propensity to throw their lives into the maw of fate, irrationally risking everything on the turn of a roulette wheel. As with much of Dostoevsky's work, The Gambler has the tortured quality of the author's own personal experience. That's vividly expressed in the writing and Prokofiev's brilliance was his ability to convert that obsessive quality into a driving dynamic music that pushes boundaries and yet remains essentially Russian in its character.

There's something of a revolutionary spirit in Alexei Ivanovich, or at least - since his concerns are very much self-obsessed - there's a certain disregard for the social order that he sees around him in the casino of a German spa town. 25 years old, university educated and employed as a tutor for Russian family, Alexei believes he's as good as any of the titled aristocracy and worthy of the love of Polina, the stepdaughter of the General. He's scornful of the bourgeois lifestyle, where they are always concerned about money and never happy. The General himself has debts to pay however, so Alexei knows that he needs to have money if he is to woo Polina away from a French Marquis who has given the family a loan.

Alexei's "Tatar nature" however has led him to see gambling as an alternative means of acquiring wealth and happiness and earn the respect of Polina. "Money is everything", he tells her, "You would see me differently. Not as a slave". But he has exhausted the savings of his salary and lost the huge sum of 6,000 guilders playing roulette at the casino. The General is worried at the instability and lack of rational behaviour that Alexei exhibits, and has to apologise on his behalf to try and prevent a duel with Baron Wurmerhelm when the tutor calculatedly goes out of his way to insult the Baroness.

The General however is soon rather more concerned about equally reckless behaviour that threatens to undermine his own financial prospects and his marriage to his fiancée Blanche. He has been depending on an inheritance from his grandmother, Babulenka, who he has told Blanche is at death's door, but the old lady has turned up in town and is gambling and losing every last crown of his future inheritance at the casino.

The Gambler, like Pushkin's Queen of Spades, like Tolstoy's Pierre in War and Peace (and Tolstoy's own early life of aristocratic dissolution and gambling debts) deals very much with that self-destructive tendency in the Russian nature to throw oneself at the hands of fate where the stakes are winning all or losing everything. There's no half-measures. There's a self-contradiction in the position of Alexei who has ambitions towards acceptance and respectability in this society and also in the General who values honour and reputation. It seems that there is also a certain amount of concern about keeping up such appearances and measuring up to their international neighbours, with Germans, French ad English all present in this setting.

Karoline Gruber's direction of the Vienna State Opera's new production of The Gambler attempts to bring together all the colour and contradiction of the positions expressed in the work, along with all the madness that ensues when alcohol is added to the mix. The set depicts the German town as a fairground ride, a merry-go-round on a Russian roulette wheel, which is lot of metaphors to mix that don't necessarily go together, but then neither does the Russian psyche depicted by Dostoevsky and Prokofiev, which is complex and contradictory at war and at play. The costumes are cartoonish and caricatural, with Baron and Baroness Wurnerhelm looking like something out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the gamblers in the casino and Alexei transforming into half-reptilian monsters.

It all looks terrific, with plenty of gold glitter thrown as well, creating a fantastical, non-naturalistic look that probes the deeper nature of the work. The larger-than-life character can also be applied to Prokofiev's score and Simone Young conducts to bring all that wild dynamic out of the orchestra performance. Rather than see it a collection of scenes, Young brings a greater sense of the work as a grand canvas that has coherence, is constantly building and upping the ante, marching towards an inevitably dramatic conclusion.

The greater coherence of the work is also brought out in the excellent singing performances. Alexei was one of the first roles I saw Misha Didyk singing (in the Barenboim/Tcherniakov 2008 Berlin Staatsoper production), and it's still one of his best roles. He can be a little strained elsewhere, but is generally more contained in the Russian repertoire and doesn't let Alexei slip overboard into wild madness - or at least not too early anyway. There's terrific singing also from Linda Watson, full of character, poise and recklessness as Babulenka; Elena Guseva is an impressive Polina, the role well sung and played with an appropriate sense of coolness gradually dissolving as Polina recognises that she has no control of her own fate. Dmitry Ulyanov plays the exasperated General well, but Elena Maximova's Blanche could do with a little more character and fieriness.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper, Wiener Staatsoper Live

Prokofiev - The Gambler

Sergei Prokofiev - The Gambler

Staatsoper unter den Linden, Berlin, 2008

Daniel Barenboim, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Vladimir Ognovenko, Kristine Opolais, Misha Didyk, Stefania Toczyska

Unitel Classica - C-Major

Dostoevsky’s short novella The Gambler is usually paired in book form with Poor Folk, the two stories reflecting rather contrasting themes and styles, but also in a way complementing each other. In Poor Folk, (if memory serves me correctly) a letter-writing couple find that their choices are limited, and the nature of their love defined and denied by the more pressing efforts put into simply struggling to exist. The characters in The Gambler on the other hand may appear to have so much money that they can fritter thousands away on the spin of a roulette wheel, but in reality they are similarly trapped in a lifestyle that restricts and distorts their course of their lives and their actions towards other people. In many ways both stories say a lot about social distinctions, but more in a way that reveals various attitudes and aspects of the Russian character.

Prokofiev’s opera version of The Gambler adheres fairly closely to the characters, themes and narrative of Dostoevsky’s book, the action set in a resort town of Roulettenburg, where the General, his family and entourage are staying at a hotel and making use of its casino. Alexsy, the tutor, has recklessly lost all of the General’s step-daughter Polina’s money on a game of roulette, but is determined to do everything he can to not so much win it back – though that would help – as much as win her favour. Polina however is toying with him, at the same time as accepting the advances of the Marquis, urging Alexsy on to act outrageously towards Baron and Baroness Wurmerhelm. The General meanwhile is in serious debt to the Marquis, but is expecting to gain an inheritance from the imminent demise of his mother. His engagement to Blanche rests on this inheritance also, since it is clear that she will not stick around unless the money comes through. To everyone’s great surprise however, the ailing old lady, Babulenka, thought to be on the point of death, turns up in Roulettenburg, with her own ideas on how to spend her money.

Composed in 1916, The Gambler is a little-known and rarely performed early Prokofiev work, and it’s not the easiest opera to like. It’s filled with unsympathetic, rather hateful characters whose sense of reality and the nature of their relationships with other people have been corrupted by money.  The music and singing moreover are not exactly harmonious – you won’t find any hummable arias here. On the other hand, the rising fever pitch that eventually explodes in Act 4 (with some magnificent singing in the last two Acts) is perfectly appropriate for qualities and themes of Dostoevsky’s work, and those are brought out exceptionally well in controversial director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging for the 2008 production at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin. A modern-day staging (there’s nothing in this opera that fixes it in any period, and the themes are completely relevant and modern), Tcherniakov assists in putting across the complexity of the relationships between the characters by allowing different rooms of the hotel and casino to be seen simultaneously in a kind of split-screen form, adding to the picture we have of the personalities, even contradicting and contrasting what is being said by the characters with what is really going on behind the scenes.

Prokofiev’s score does much the same thing, underscoring the behaviour of the characters with emphatic woodwind trills, staccato strings and deep notes from the brass section. The DTS HD Master Audio 5.1 track on the Blu-ray disc is marvellous for capturing the huge dynamic range of the score, balancing the mix superbly between the singing and the orchestra. Partly that’s down to the scoring being composed not to compete with the singing but rather support it, partly that’s down to Barenboim’s management of the orchestra, and partly it’s down to the excellent surround mix. Consequently the singing dominates and is strong and clear, but when the orchestral parts and flourishes are called for, they are almost overwhelmingly powerful. The 1080/60i transfer is perfectly clear, the direction for television (with some side-stage angles) capturing the flow of what is occurring on the stage. Other than some brief notes in the booklet, there are no extra features on the disc.