Five-star Shostakovich at Covent Garden
Half cynical farce, half bleak tragedy, Shostakovich’s second opera has a schizoid quality that should leave audiences feeling disorientated. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is the work of a youthful genius in a state of tumultuous emotional confusion, passionate and enraged but already frustrated and constricted by the Soviet system under whose auspices it was composed.
There is no steady moral compass operating here, as the tone lurches from black to white to grey, circling round a central figure who is both an abused woman refusing to be victimised and a self-centred monster who kills to suit herself. At a time when the relation between the sexes is being so hotly debated, this is a disturbing case-study that defies facile standards of right or wrong. We may feel sympathy for the bored, despised and powerless Katerina, but she makes some damned bad choices with inevitable consequences.
Richard Jones’s superb production, first seen in 2004 and impeccably rehearsed for this revival by Elaine Kidd, confronts all these complexities squarely. Unlike some interpretations (such as that of Dmitri Tcherniakov, seen at ENO in 2015), it makes no attempt to unify the style of the action: instead it allows the score’s mercurial moods to dictate whether a scene is presented as naturalistically or expressionistically, while never quite breaking the thread of connection with credible behaviour and motivation.
Although the opera was written in the early Thirties and set in the Mtsensk of the 1840s, John Macfarlane’s wonderfully imaginative designs move the setting forward to somewhere more like the Sixties – the ghost of Katerina’s murdered father-in-law appears to her through a fuzzy television. The action could just as plausibly take place in redneck America as in Khrushchev’s Russia. But this isn’t localised political satire: what Shostakovich – and Jones – expose is the inborn corruption of the human animal.
In the title role, Eva-maria Westbroek allows Katerina a sad dignity devoid of sentimentality: for her, what happens is not a game, but a matter of life or death, culminating in the desperate pathos of her fate on the cruel road to Siberia. Westbroek is in magnificent voice throughout, and hers is a performance of the highest quality.
She meets her match in Brandon Jovanovich, an American tenor making his Covent Garden debut as her feckless lover Sergey, and the much-loved veteran John Tomlinson as the old brute Boris. Both of them are first-class, complemented by a wealth of arresting cameos. The chorus is in stupendous form, not least in its drilled execution of Jones’s trademark choreographic manoeuvres.
Shostakovich’s manically inventive imagination and extensive instrumental palate is an open temptation to splashy conductors to go for broke, oblivious of the singers’ need to be heard above the din. Antonio Pappano is wise enough to resist this trap, relishing the passages of intense melancholy and lyrical delicacy as much as the crazy triple fortissimo interludes. This may be a gruelling and challenging evening that offers no gentle consolation, but it is a deeply rewarding and utterly compelling one too.
Until April 27. Tickets: 0207 304 4000; roh.org.uk
The central figure is both an abused woman refusing to be victimised and a selfcentred monster who kills to suit herself