Timofey Kulyabin openly stands against the war against Ukraine. He left Russia, his shows were cancelled, the latest being Don Pasquale at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. He is part of the age-old, brilliant line of Russian directors. The Queen of Spades is his first opera in France; he enhanced the piece’s contemporary character that lies in the notions of love, addiction and madness. As a symbol of the free power of arts and culture, he gathered Russian and Ukrainian singers to perform in this production. After Eugene Onegin and Mazeppa, Tchaikovsky went back to Pushkin’s work to write The Queen of Spades, for which he reached peak Romanticism, mixing lyricism, poetic accents, fantasy and sometimes irony. This work is comparable to that of geniuses such as Gogol, Dostoevsky or Bulgakov. After conducting memorable Russian productions in Lyon, such as Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress or Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, Daniele Rustioni is circling back to his beloved Russian repertoire.