Review - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - Opera Australia

Grappling with a big one
For a couple of years Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsesnk was one of the most often performed contemporary operas. It had simultaneous premieres in Leningrad and Moscow and at one point simultaneous productions in three Moscow theatres alone. Other productions followed. In London it was given in a concert performance in 1936 followed by BBC broadcast. The young Benjamin Britten heard it and was impressed by the powerful interludes and also by one of the singers, Peter Pears, who had a minor role. After the American premiere the sensational opera was topical enough to rate a mention in the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes (in the song "The Three B's"). Then came Stalin's visit to a performance in Moscow and the subsequent attacks on the opera, Shostakovich's ballet The Limpid Stream and the composer himself. The opera was withdrawn immediately. There was difficulty obtaining the music for that London concert in 1936 and after then it disappeared from every stage until 1959 when the Dusseldorf Opera managed to wrangle performance materials from the Soviet Music Publishing authority. By then Shostakovich was testing the waters - Stalin had died and Kruschev had made public the extent of Stalin's terror - by issuing a revised version of the opera. Only slowly and not until after Shostakovich's death did the original version begin to be staged again. Adelaide saw it in 1984 at that year's Festival where the composer's son Maxim was a guest.

After the initial staging by Opera Australia of the original version of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Sydney back in 2002 the on-and-off decisions to programme it for a Melbourne season kept me drooling with anticipation. After the 2006 decision to drop it from the Melbourne season (due to the cost of mounting the opera - it requires a huge orchestra and chorus - that never gets recouped) I thought that would be the end of it. But now here it is, in all its sensational glory!

Director Francesca Zambello updates the story to the Soviet era where overbearing male sexuality is just another form of oppression. Set in provincial Russia, the bored and sexually unfulfilled Katerina (Susan Bullock) lives in an environment of rampaging male sexuality, like Chekhov meets jerkoff! Her husband Zinovy (David Corcoran) is an impotent weakling while her lecherous father-in-law Boris (Daniel Sumegi), constantly prowling around her bedroom would do the job for him.

Shostakovich’s music is exuberant and irreverent but with astonishing power in places or lyricism in others, like the cathartic interludes, that have a shattering impact. The first two acts, leading up Katerina and her lover Sergei (Richard Berkeley-Steele) murdering her husband seethe with threatening or raucous music that explode in the scenes of sex or violence that are still confronting even today. The most notorious is the on stage love making between Katerina and Sergei. In the opening scene trombones blurt slyly as Boris insinuates that she is looking for a lover and again in a later scene when he predicts her infidelity. Finally, alone in her room with Sergei their love making is described by music that is as frenzied and confronting as the stage action. Katerina’s ecstasy as she experiences the passion her impotent husband never gave her while the philandering Sergei adds another conquest; the trombones now grunting wildly along with every thrust in music that reaches a literal climax and aftermath that has to be heard to be believed!

Among the other notorious scenes is Sergei’s near rape of the cook Aksinya (Jacqueline Dark) while the near naked workmen purve and masturbate as she screams in terror. Even before it begins Zambello uses the sleazy linking interlude Shostakovich wrote to good effect beginning the scene with Sergei signalling the workmen to gather in the wash house and making it obvious the attack is well planned and that Sergei is the ringleader. The entire production reeks with sex, violence or lampooning of authority and if the men of the Mtsensk district seem to get up circle jerks or sex parties faster and more frequently than a modern day frat house it is with the same comic-book irony that is a hallmark of Shostakovich’s genius. The coarseness of the male sexuality as played here sets Katerina's ecstatic sexual awakening in sharp relief. Even though it is very confrontingly depicted it looks positively virtuous in comparison with the Boris and his worker's lechery.

Bullock is astounding in this most difficult role. A notable Elektra, her voice rides the huge orchestra in the dramatic scenes with a cut and edge that remains clean and steady at all times. Her recent success in the Chandos recording of Salome, where she scales down her tone to an insinuating whisper is no studio trick either. In the opening scene and later, in the plaintive about animals mating happily but not her, she can spin her voice into a mournful whisper. In the same way she projects the aria in the last act about the black lake out into the auditorium while draining her voice of colour to suggest Katerina numb from both cold and Sergei’s rejection. She acts the highly charged scenes with the same conviction she invests in every other scene right down to weary resignation with which she drowns herself and Sergei’s new mistress. I suspect now that the lulling, romantic and otherwise polite repertoire she chose for her recital was to show her vocal nice side.

Berkeley-Steele copes magnificently the short, jabbing vocal lines Shostakovich gives Sergei, as though he were – appropriately - a cock crowing. Sumegi, looking like Stalin and groping his crotch as often as his vodka bottle is an unashamedly disgusting Boris. All thee have excellent diction and project the text well. In the few spoken passages Bullock's gentle, Julie Andrews-ish English accent actually lends her character a hint of niceness. Sung in English the translation is by the opera producer David Pountney for his English National Opera production which is coy in places other translations are not and forthright in places others are are tamer. Katerina's aria about animals mating, for instance, uses more sexualised language than the translations accompanying either of the two commercial CD recordings of the opera.

The smaller but necessary roles have been cast from strength. Shostakovich drives his buffo tenors hard it seems; the tenor singing the Police Captain in his earlier opera The Nose is required to sing in alt and reach an E above top C. As the shabby peasant Kanen Breen is taxed by the orchestral tsunami Shostakovich sets against the scene in which he discovers Zinovy's body. As a result he is barely audible against the wild mazurka played forte by the full orchestra and resorts to a frenzied semaphore for the scene. It's also a little odd seeing a vagrant who happens to have a hammer in his pocket in order to smash the lock on the cellar door!

Richard Armstrong has apparently not conducted the work before but scored point after point of the music's Janus nature. Colouring the lyrical passages for Katerina, the quirky but sinister little violin passage as Boris eats the fatal mushrooms and, most importantly, exploding the cathartic interludes with shattering force. Over the last decade Orchestra Victoria have had the fortune to play not only the standard repertoire but some of the formative operas of the twentieth century by Janacek (Jenufa and Vec Makropulos), Richard Strauss (Arabella, Der Rosenkavalier and Salome), Berg (Wozzeck and Lulu) and Britten (Billy Budd and Peter Grimes) as well as new works like Batavia by Richard Mills. Consequently they have become a pretty fearsome ensemble and well versed in the stylistic and dramatic requirements of the composers. So on one night you can get the classical eloquence of Mozart and Bellini and then, at this, the full barrage of a young and uncensored Shostakovich.

Zambello's update appears to be roughly the same time that the opera was written. Like Patrice Chereau, who set a trend (most famously in his 1976 Ring cycle at Bayreuth) for setting an opera in the time it was written rather the time it is set, this simple action often contextualises a work in rewarding ways, even without imposing many social or political references from the time. As the Marxist overtones pervaded Chereau's interpretation of Wagner, the ruthlessness of the purges and oppressions that were beginning in the Soviet Union underpin the story, giving some idea of what was really disturbing to Stalin and his committee. The sudden sighting of a portable television in the police scene disrupts this concept and, seeing as it has little dramatic impact, would be a good thing to drop. Apart from this, and a small carp about the depth and height from the stage of the set from Katerina's bedroom which necessitates the singers to clamour up steps to the room and over the bed to get into it, the visual production is one of the most satisfying Opera Australia have ever created. If it were given a little more space Sergei and Katerina might not need to spill their lovemaking onto the fore stage. Another smaller carp is that some of the male chorus and extras sport incongruous, state-of-the-art haircuts, and what's with those orange garbage bags the convicts tote around in the last act!

The poverty of regional Russia under Soviet collectivisation is superbly conveyed and gives the Ismailova's a level of desperation not in Leskov's story of comfortable bourgeoisie. Here the sordid environment is both physical and metaphorical. Even before the rape scene, the sight of the decrepit bath house and a few grimy self-groping workmen is revolting. When the rape is underway the scene, with its central focus on Aksinya trapped in a barrel and with the men arranged on either side it looks like a travesty of a classical painting, where the beauty of the carefully arranged figures is here, made into a compelling, if disgusting, sight; your gaze following the frenzied movement of the figures as they maul the helpless woman in the same way the figure placement in a painting draws your gaze around the composition.


Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk op 29 by Dmitry Shostakovich
Libretto by Alexander Preis and the composer after the story by Nicolai Leskov (1886)
First performed at the Malay Theatre, Leningrad 22 January 1934
First Australian performance, Festival Theatre, Adelaide March 1984
First performance of this production Sydney Opera House, 11 June 2002

Katerina Ismailova - Susan Bullock
Sergei - Richard Berkeley-Steele
Zinovy Ismailov - David Corcoran
Boris Ismailov - Daniel Sumegi
Sonyetka - Dominica Matthews
Aksinya / Woman Convict - Jacqueline Dark
Teacher / Shabby Peasant - Kanen Breen
Steward / Sentry - Richard Anderson
Sergeant / Chief of Police - Richard Alexander
Foreman 1 / Coachman - Stephen Smith
Foreman 2 - Graeme Macfarlane
Foreman 3 / Mill-Hand - David Thelander
Porter - Charlie Kedmenec
Priest - Gennadi Dubinsky
Policeman - Shane Lowrencev
Drunk Guest - David Lewis
Old Convict - Jud Arthur
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Richard Armstrong
Director - Francesca Zambello
Set Designer - Hildegard Bechtler
Costume Designer - Tess Schofield
State Theatre, The Arts Centre 24, 29 April, 2 & 5 May 2009

picture by Jeff Busby

This is an extended version of the review published in Canvas/MCV

BTW there really is a place called Mtsensk

& check out Galina Fishnetskaya as Katerina