Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - State Theatre - Apr 27, 2009

The opera that got up Stalin's nose

April 27, 2009

LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK
By Dmitri Shostakovich,
Opera Australia. State Theatre.
Until May 5.
Reviewer John Slavin

IT IS difficult to know what made Stalin so savagely persecute this opera's composer. Perhaps it was its anti-Utopianism.

The work, brilliantly directed by Francesca Zambello, depicts a vodka and sex-sodden rural working class brutalised by the system. Katerina (Susan Bullock) is bored and neglected by her husband, Zinovy (David Corcoran), the son of merchant Boris Ismailov (Daniel Sumegi). When her husband leaves on business she is seduced by itinerant worker Sergei (Richard Berkeley-Steele). The lovers are soon exposed and Katerina murders first her father-in-law and afterwards her husband.

This tale of immoral passion is lucidly and passionately depicted. Hildegard Bechtler's sets are efficiently created out of a depressingly functional Rubik's Cube. The dreary isolation of this Russian hinterland is not the official fantasy of agit-prop farm labourers. There is a strong sense of threat and lawlessness in the first half that leads to rape, seduction, violence and murder.

But it is Shostakovich's extraordinary score that is the key player in the drama. It represents both the composer's perspective, satirical, priapic and bitter, and a Dionysian profligacy that bursts open the repressive hypocrisy of traditional society.

There is something brutal and cruel about the score. Sergei and Katerina's erotic gymnastics are depicted with big explosive discords reminiscent of Wozzeck. When the heroine mourns her murdered father-in-law, her elegy is parodied by lewd flute and bassoon.

Parody explodes in the second half. The officials who arrest the lovers are Soviet military police straight out of political cartoons. But Shostakovich's avant-garde exploration of the disjunction between sound and vision makes this work a rich musical experience as Orchestra Victoria, directed by Richard Armstrong, subverts the drama.

Berkeley-Steele's Sergei is stretched in the upper register but suitably romantic and duplicitous. Sumegi's Boris is what Sergei is destined to become, a drunken bully lashing out against his sexual impotence.

As Katerina, Bullock is wistful, vulnerable and impulsive. She does not tick like a time bomb with sensuality, the approach the role usually evokes. Her sweet tone and meticulous phrasing is not musically powerful, but it is a highly intelligent interpretation.

Explosive in its idiom, this opera is as rough, dissident and brave as the day it was conceived.

I Capuleti, State Theatre, April 14, 2009

Romance in full voice

Lovers amid carnage: Romeo (Catherine Carby) and Giulietta (Hye Seoung Kwon).
Photo: Jeff Busby

I CAPULETI E I MONTECCHI: BELLINI
Opera Australia, State Theatre,
April 14. Until May 9. 150 minutes
Reviewer John Slavin

IN ORPHA Phelan's production of Bellini's version of Romeo and Juliet, the act one set makes an ideological statement. The fire curtain is transformed into a massive metal wall. Drawn on it is a bull's eye pock-marked with bullet holes.

The Capuleti and the Montecchi are warring clans, in this instance in drab grey suits, who probably represent the internecine violence of Northern Ireland. Fairy lights traverse the wall and its target, a symbol of the love between Giulietta (Hye Seoung Kwon) and Romeo (Catherine Carby) that might refute the carnage.

But scarcely before the singing begins, there is an arbitrary murder of a hostage by a small boy with a rifle. It is supervised by the Capuleti leader (Shane Lowrencev) and its violence freezes the blood. It is against such shocking production values that the expressive tact of the music's best moments is measured. But the composer has not yet learned to establish complex character through his music and so there is no inner dynamism. Rather the narrative is a frame on which to hang the vocal exercises of bel canto.

There is no balcony, no brief happiness for the lovers. True, when Romeo first appears in his enemy's camp, he is brave and noble of voice and demeanour. But this is quickly undermined by the personal drama and when he faces his nemesis and rival, Tebaldo (Aldo Di Toro) on the battlefield, news of Giulietta's apparent death reduces both heroes to blubbering suicidal boys. Such impotent passion is underwritten by two females in the principal roles that emphasises their vulnerability. Carby, who is in fine voice with lovely coloratura flourishes, attempts to make of Romeo a charismatic romantic straight out of Walter Scott, but the libretto and the score allow her no space.

Giulietta is a thankless role. Chronically anxious, she is a crushed doll even before we first meet her.

Hye, whose lyric soprano is perfectly suited to the role, gives her a sweetness that is undemonstrative yet full of sentiment. She dies without poison or dagger, a victim of her romantic sensibility.

Brad Cohen guides Orchestra Victoria with a lyrical lightness of touch and there are moments when the music achieves a classic nobility and simplicity, a hint of the greatness to come.