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“Pornophony,” declared the critics at the New York premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. More concerningly for the Soviet composer, Pravda denounced the score as “coarse and vulgar” and Stalin’s disapproval of its brutal sexuality jeopardised Shostakovich’s career. The opera tells the story of Katerina, a bored housewife driven to adultery, murder, and a grisly Siberian death. But Shostakovich’s sympathy remains fully with his anti-heroine, the poignant lyricism of her arias offering respite from the raucous cynicism of the rest of the score.
The excesses of the music cry out for an equally exuberant staging, but the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance at Carnegie Hall wasn’t lacking in drama. Music director Andris Nelsons has led the BSO in a decade-long survey of Shostakovich’s music, and their experience with the style showed. Nelsons treats the work as an extended orchestral showpiece hinging on the orchestral interludes depicting key plot points.
There’s the lurid lovemaking in the first act that culminates in the most graphic depiction of orgasm in the operatic canon, complete with gliding trombones. The central Passacaglia presents, in essence, the opera in miniature, relentlessly building in intensity towards a shocking peak. Best of all is the fugue in the wedding scene, in which the strings interlace with the chorus in complex polyphony. Here, Nelsons’ conducting highlighted the raw virtuosity of the orchestra and chorus, with brilliantly sarcastic tone and ear-splitting climaxes.
But Lady Macbeth is ultimately an opera, and Nelsons’ focus on orchestral brilliance sometimes came at the expense of his singers. In the demanding title role, Kristine Opolais pushed her lyric soprano to its absolute limits in order to be heard above the orchestra. Her once-plush voice now sounds hollow and acidic, with wayward intonation in Shostakovich’s more dissonant passages. Yet she remains a magnetic stage presence, here able to convey Katerina’s loneliness, desperation and vicious amorality through her facial expressions alone. It was a remarkable piece of acting, especially given the confines of a concert performance.
Opolais found her ideal scene partner in Günther Groissböck’s Boris, Katerina’s abusive father-in-law whom she murders with poisoned mushrooms. Groissböck’s imposing, virile bass has real presence, and he delivered the text with the confidence of a stage actor. As his impotent son, tenor Peter Hoare brought bright, polished tone; in contrast, Brenden Gunnell as Katerina’s lover Sergey often sounded pale despite the undeniable beauty of his sound.
Among the multitude of priests, peasants and convicts that add local colour to the plot, the finest contributions came from Maria Barakova’s enticing Sonyetka, Alexander Kravets’ scene-stealing drunk peasant, and Patrick Guetti’s Sargeant, whose sonorous bass filled the auditorium in the final march to Siberia.
★★★☆☆
