This Friday, the Dallas Opera opens Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and as Scott Cantrell writes, it is an opera in the grandest sense:

“There will be more people on the stage, I think, than with anything we’ve ever done,” says Dallas Opera music director Graeme Jenkins, who’s conducting the performances. “I take my hat off to [artistic director] Jonathan Pell, who went off to audition all these young Russian singers. He’s assembled a fantastic cast. And I’m incredibly proud of what the chorus have done, to memorize over an hour of Russian text.”

The opera hasn’t been performed in Dallas in more than 30 years, and the production will feature a design by the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, the man behind Solaris and Andrei Rublev.