Taking as a librettoall the the scenes featuring OPHELIA in Shakespeare´s "HAMLET", sung in the English original, it brings to life family conflicts, the clash between the absurd and the "normal" and the passion of unrequited and rejected love that run through everyday existence, in Russia as everywhere else.

History:...
Ophelia was created in Moscow in 1982. It never played in in a regular theater, not even a small one off-off Gorky Street or on the fringe of Russia´s metrolopis. In four peripatetic years, it moved from artists´ clubs to Houses of Culture, from students´ dormitories to their institutes. But wherever it went, it delighted, breathing a fresh, vibrant spirit into harshly lit rooms or a lecture hall dominated by a bas-relief of Lenin.

Cast
For the underground performances of Ophelia Sergei gathered some really great people - singers and musicians - from Moscow´s jazz, rock & classical scene. Yelena Karetnikova was Ophelia, Sergei Minayev (Moscow popular DJ) sang Hamlet, Arkady Kirichenko from the famous jazz avantgarde group TriO was Polonius, Anatoly Dorovskikh - Laertes. The band of 7 included Arkady Shilkloper (now with the ECM, one of the best jazz french horn players), Mikhail Kartenikov (bass), Alexander Maistrovsky (drums), Lesya Shekerova (violin)...

Vienna, Moscow, London...
After moving to Vienna in 1987, Sergei was invited to make Ophelia as a fringe production in the Vienna "scene" club "Roter Engel" ("Red Angel"). That was so much fun auditioning young singers from the Vienna jazz and rock scene. For the main part he chose a young student of the Vienna Conservatory, Tania Golden. "Ophelia" became an important step in her career as a singer and as an actress. So it was for Viktor Gernot and Pual Wimberger...

Meanwhile changes in Moscow enabled Mikhail Kisliarov, the former student and assistant to the Bolshoi Theater director Alexander Pokrovsky to produce Ophelia on the stage of Moscow Chamber Opera in 1991-92. In 1993 Mikhail was invited to repeat his staging with the graduate students of the Guildford School of Dramatic Art in England.
 

Recording
Soon after moving to Vienna, an American friend from Moscow called from London and told Sergei that he had met up with record producer Leo Feigin, whose independent lable Leo Records was by then firmly established as a major source of avantgarde and new music from all over the world including the Soviet Union. Leo had heard Ophelia by chance on the back of another tape sent to him from the Soviet Union, and he encouraged Sergei to make a record of the opera. So he went back to Moscow in the autumn of 1987 and made a studio recording, taping Lena, Anatoly and Arcady. The part of Hamlet on the disc (LR 600) is performed by an American black singer living in Vienna, Hannibal Means.

Critics´voices
Ophelia´s songs are beautifully scored...The production brought out firmly the depth of the tragedy and gave the impression that the Ophelia story can stand alone from the main text of the Prince of Denmark."

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