New Adaptation of “Anush” Opera

Cannes Film Festival award-winner Serge Avedikian and French choreographer Nicolas Musin presented the modernized version of the Armenian opera, “Anush.” The opera is based on Hovannes Tumanyan’s poem Anush about a simple village girl’s tragic love story. It was first staged in modern day Gyumri in 1912, with the music and libretto authored by the talented musician Armen Tigranyan. The joint Armenian-French project is a mixture of conceptual and technological solutions that tries to preserve the general concepts of composer Tigranyan and writer Tumanyan, as well as the producer and choreographer, while at the same time giving the production an entirely modern breadth and depth. Avedikian, who adapted the libretto of “Anush,” cautions, “It’s not the ‘Anush’ that the Armenian audience has been seeing since the Soviet era.” The realization of this ambitious project took over two years. The project has been supported by the French and Armenian Culture Ministries and sponsored by VivaCell-MTS.