The opera that got up Stalin's nose
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.
