Opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Coliseum)
Potent horror
Michael Tanner
Ater reaching absolute artistic zero with Don Giovanni, English National Opera has redeemed itself handsomely with another saga of lust and murder avenged, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, still a rarity despite its obvious appeal to the temper of the time. This production is as complete a success as the nature of the piece allows, with Stefanos Lazaridis's brilliant sets, complicated but always elucidating the action, working with immaculate smoothness. It's wonderful to feel in such safe hands, to be sure a few minutes into a piece that everything is going to work according to plan.
The first impression is total oppression, a kind of spacious claustrophobia in which nothing natural and wholesome could conceivably flourish, thanks to the number of grids and heavy metal doors. Katerina Ismailova sits on a kitchen chair, tense and bored, and immediately a whole way of living, or of not being able to live, is brought before us. The set often moves and changes, each change being a variation on what we first see. There are three female figures dressed in black who mime some of the action, sometimes collaborating with Katerina's schemes for relieving her boredom, sometimes taking an independent line on them. They add to the sense of a panopticon.
This is also David Pountney at his best, inventive in an always relevant way, nothing imposed on the work, but everything elicited from it that can be. The eye is always kept busy, which is all to the good, since the music allows for quite a lot of spare attention. Defensive commentators often write about how amazing this is for a second opera, and that's true, but it shouldn't be overlooked that it is still a flawed work, with a flabby and prolix libretto, which means a good deal of very thin music. It's a long time since I heard the revised version of the score, but the composer certainly had grounds for second thoughts, quite apart from what the Party felt about it all. Even in so superlative a production and musical performance as this at least half an hour could be cut with profit, and some of it really needed to be recomposed.
Because this work remains relatively unfamiliar, and we see so much of Janacek and even, comparatively, of Berg's Lulu, it is hard to watch it without thinking of their transgressive heroines, Katerina seeming a mixture of Katya Kabanova and Lulu, the first in her need for a fuller life, the second in the mixture of hilarious and blood-freezing lack of conscience with which she disposes of her father-in-law and her husband. At least with Shostakovich's work we should still be fresh enough in responding to it to be able to ask whether it is possible to combine acid satire and tragic pretensions. The former tends towards the stereotyping of people, making them ridiculous by eliminating their individuating features, while the latter explores the agonies of momentous choices on which much besides the personal depends, but which always has its roots in those. Lady Macbeth doesn't succeed in combining them, and leaves open the question of whether they ever could be combined.
Katerina's pathetic husband is a mere figure of fun, who exists only to be cuckolded and eliminated. Her father-in-law Boris, played with repulsive brutality and coarseness, and utter conviction, by Pavlo Hunka, escapes being a type, and is therefore genuinely sinister. His death from eating Katerina's poisoned mushrooms is a scene of potent horror, though whether he and it deserve the grandiose interlude which follows is not clear. Most bewildering of all is
the quasi-heroine herself, and though I can't imagine a more complete portrayal of the role than Vivian Tierney gives it, the nature of her destiny remains opaque, not what it is but how we should take it. Being as upset as we are over Katya is out of the question, but regarding it as the last stage of a strip cartoon is no more appropriate.
But then that is so often the case with this composer. Being so wretched, and having a strong line in the sardonic, he has his woodwind or his characters wandering lonely as a cloud one moment, snarling with contempt the next, and never working Out how seriously they are being taken by their creator, a problem be also refuses to face. Under the circumstances a production which bares all, as this one does, and stays obstinately poker-faced about it, seems the fullest justice that can be done. The same goes for the musical treatment, a deadpan affair from Mark Wigglesworth, who keeps the orchestral texture lucid, and helpfully restrains the accompaniment so that virtually every word can be heard, especially from Katerina — I hope Tierney is employed not only to continue her superb performances but to teach other sopranos how to sing intelligibly.
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