Shostakovich’s opera is conducted and directed with brutal clarityIn spite or perhaps because of its scandalous early performance history we often forget how stridently revolutionary a piece Shostakovich’s second and last opera really is. Two days after Stalin walked out of a Moscow staging in 1936, Pravda condemned Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as “muddle instead of music”, and the work vanished from the Soviet repertoire for nearly three decades. But there is nothing muddled about Peter Konwitschny and Alexander Vedernikov’s new production for the Danish Royal Opera.
Making his debut at the Danish house, Vedernikov negotiates vividly and urgently Shostakovich’s lurching contrasts between blistering satire, crushing despair and passionate yearning. In a promising partnership with the house orchestra and its fine company of soloists, Vedernikov’s level-headed direction ensures that each aspect of this kaleidoscopic score always keeps the others in check.
A similar clarity – short on sentimentality but long on emotion – marks Konwitschny’s direction, which uses Timo Dentler’s simple set and Okarina Peter’s bold costumes to project the drama with unflinching focus. The stage is framed on three sides by uniform square tiles and crossed from right to left by a conveyor belt, whose practical function is to allow the singers to enter and exit holding a continuous pose, but which also represents time’s indifference to individual action.
Katerina, sung by Anne Margrethe Dahl, first enters leaning coquettishly against her bed in a yellow negligee and girlish plaits. One could take her for a mechanical doll, but as the character expands beyond the mercilessly enforced banality of her environment, Dahl’s movement and singing styles echo her growing sense of moral yearning and power in womanhood. Her Act One aria, memorably rendered in Dahl’s deeply inflected soprano, is delivered to a younger version of herself, an identically clad little girl. She returns later with a balloon and the two Katerinas play with it before it disappears up into the fly tower, bearing the heroine’s illusory future with it.
Konwitschny is merciless with the other characters, who are similarly colour-coded but perversely one-dimensional: lime green for her effete and ineffectual husband, red for her lecherous father-in-law with his rancid comb-over, blue for Sergei. The latter, admirably sung by Johnny van Hal and played as a simple good-looking thug on the make, is allowed for a moment to turn back time, pushing the adulterous bed from left to centre-stage. But the action has no purchase, and as the stage closes in at the end, even the guards look terrified before they and their dehumanised charges are borne off by the conveyor one final time.
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