TLS 5816 (Dmitri Dmitrovich): Guy Dammann: Fishing for arias

[Frank Forman]

TLS 5816: Guy Dammann: Fishing for arias
Published: 17 September 2014

Guy Dammann teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He writes
on music and other subjects for the Guardian, Economist and elsewhere.

Dmitri Shostakovich
LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK
Oslo Opera House, Norway, until October 3, then at Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Though staged frequently enough, Shostakovich's second opera, Lady Macbeth
of Mtsensk, remains less well known for its music and action than as the
occasion of political controversy. Following its first performances in
1934 (the opera opened, unusually, in two different productions in Moscow
and Leningrad in the same month), and its almost immediate critical
acclaim as the "first significant new opera" of the Soviet period, the
opera was the subject of an anonymous editorial in Pravda which, in its
menacingly clear statement of what kind of music the state expected of its
composers, had more influence on the history of Russian music than any
other comparable document.

Shostakovich's shock at the reversal of fortunes suffered by his opera
(the work was dropped almost overnight after the Pravda editorial) was
compounded by the fact that Lady Macbeth was itself conceived as an answer
to the somewhat similar criticisms made of his first opera, The Nose
(after Gogol). The earlier work had also met with praise, albeit of a
qualified variety, but had also been singled out by populist critics for
its failure to contribute anything of ideological or social significance,
filling the vacuum by revelling decadently in the categories of the absurd
and grotesque. In response, Shostakovich explicitly conceived Lady Macbeth
(or Katerina Izmaylova, as the Moscow and later revised versions were
titled) as a tragic satire and portrait of a woman who is laid low by her
inability to work (as a rich merchant's wife) and who is "stifled by the
nightmarish conditions of pre-Revolutionary society".

It represents an interesting, rather knowing choice on the part of its
director that the Norwegian National Opera's new production, opening the
new season in Oslo's fabulously designed waterside opera house, turns the
opera's putative conformity to the nebulous aesthetics of Soviet Realism
itself into a grotesque, verging on the absurd. Ole Anders Tandberg sets
the action in a dark fishing village high on Norway's Arctic coast. The
rotating stage is centred on the shell of a small prefab house, the
comparative privileges of whose owners are represented by its position
atop a mound of slippery rocks on which the workers congregate to clean,
pile or play around with the day's catch.

Cod, in fact, seems to be the exclusive medium for interaction for the
first three acts. Apart from Katerina, all the characters carry a large
fish, either proudly clasped to their bodies, or dangling limply by their
sides. Boris Timofeyovitch, Katerina's odious father-in-law, carries two,
even after his death. The men simulate penetration with a giant fish in
the first act's molestation of the servant girl Aksinya, while Katya and
her lover Sergey's consummation is effected on top of a mound of fish.
There is even a fully fledged fish fight, Asterix-style. Meanwhile, at
moments of introversion and intimacy, members of the orchestra's brass
section process onto the stage, singly at first then in increasingly large
numbers, dressed as a girl's band in costume for Norwegian national day.

There is perhaps nothing wrong with making a grotesque of the opera.
Indeed, in accenting continuities between Lady Macbeth and The Nose, the
staging succeeds in offering an effective piece of historical revisionism.
But there's barely a foothold for our sympathies on Erlend Birkeland's
greasy promontory, and while none of the singers succeeds in acting with
much credibility (or satirical force), Shostakovich's efforts to use his
music to encourage the audience to relate to, and even admire Katya, are
also undone here. Indeed, though there are as many lyrical flights in the
opera as in any of Shostakovich's later work, the emphasis in Oleg
Caetani's musical direction throughout is on the satirical and angular
points of the score.

Which is not to say it was badly performed. Caetani got the best out of
the house orchestra and both the phrasing and pacing were, if sometimes
uncomfortable, well controlled. The singers too, though the stage seemed
to be revolving almost as often as not, never departed from his lead, even
if some of the vocal performances verged on the dutiful. But Svetlana
Sozdateleva, as Katya, offered a firm and passionate lead. A soloist of
Moscow's Helikon opera, Sozdateleva has sung the role many times, but the
expertise never leaks over into a sense of the routine as she struggles,
against the direction, to forge an emotional link with the audience in her
main Act One aria "Zherebyonok k kobïlke toropitsya" ("The foal runs after
the filly"), in which she expresses her frustrated passions. Sozdateleva
is well supported by Alexey Kosarev's powerful tenor as Sergey, who also
towers above most of the cast, making him stick out from the crowd of
fishermen from the start. The other vocal highlight comes from Knut Skram,
whose deep, mature bass held the evening's one moment of real beauty, as
the old convict whose Mussorgskian lament frames the fourth act. The
production moves to Deutsche Oper Berlin in January, where it will open
with a completely different cast, including Evelyn Herlitzius, Thomas
Blondelle and John Tomlinson, conducted by Donald Runnicles.