Knots aplenty: Khovanshchina at WNO
Khovanshchina
Welsh National Opera
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Level 2 Raised Stalls N49, £10 under-30s
23 September 2017
WNO page
Confessions: until recently I had never seen Khovanshchina (or some version of it) all the way through; and I had not even listened to a recording all the way through. Having seen it now once I think I need to see it again in a different production.
My enjoyment of other Musorgsky vocal music prompted me to make my first visit to Cardiff. In this respect Khovanshchina doesn't disappoint: the music throughout, darkly melodic, profoundly Russian, is beautifully written for voice. Much of the cast WNO has assembled sound superb in the flattering environment of the Millennium Centre, with Miklós Sebestyén as Dosifei and Robert Hayward as Khovansky particularly impressive. I imagine Musorgsky's choral writing was a big draw of the piece for WNO, and the company's famous chorus does well with the challenging material, although, perhaps reasonably enough, begins to sound strained by the end.
So what's the problem? I know there were numerous factors that prevented Musorgsky from completing Khovanshchina but I'm sure at least part of one of them was battling with the story. There's much that's attractive about it – specifically, how to use music to describe three differently complex moralities – but to my mind there are two knotty risks: that the main figure of dramatic propulsion never appears onstage; and that without sufficient differentiation between the three opposing factions the events seem episodic and the conclusions random.
These are risks rather than inherent problems. The Tsar could be a Fortinbras-like figure, the episodic randomness a commentary on history's indifference. Yet I found the evening long and difficult, such that my main conclusion from this one experience makes me think Khovanshchina is a difficult opera to stage effectively, and there are various elements of David Pountney's production that obscured what they needed to illuminate.
The early-Soviet setting Pountney elects gives good matter for set designer Johan Engels, whose constructivist design is the production's chief delight – but in all other respects this is a confusing and lazy decision that blurs an already dense subject matter. The Revolution is of course the period of Russian history most Brits are most familiar with: ok. There are superficial similarities between the Khovansky affair and the Revolution, as between all politically turbulent episodes. But there are also very important dissimilarities – the approximation of the Old Believers to the White Army being the most unhappy – such that this setting feels an imposition rather than an elucidation.
This particular approximation is part of a wider antipathy Pountney seems to feel for Dosifei. I can understand his apparent resistance to glamourizing a religious sect but isn't that what is demanded by the music and the drama's contour? If you don't care for Dosifei and Marfa then whom do you have? I feel sure there are other ways.
No comments yet.