Unambigous comedy: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the ROH
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Amphitheatre U60, £19
24 April 2018
ROH page
I agree with all the hype: Richard Jones’s production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is by far the most successful I’ve seen. Jones’s decision to treat the piece unambiguously as a comedy, rather than as a tragedy with comic elements, takes its lead not only from the original Leskov but also from the savage, parodic grotesquerie of Shostakovich’s music, hard to make sense of in productions more earnest or more cynically sentimental. The production amplifies the music’s innate character, and thus not in spite of but because of its comedy achieves a profound and unforced horror by its end.
Pappano and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House turned in a performance that did justice to this production and this opera, in a complete transformation from yesterday’s wasted opportunity – which if you ask me just goes to show there’s nothing wrong with bread and butter (metaphorical butter, that is). The orchestra, particularly the winds, played fearlessly and fiercely and together made sense of a score the brutality of which can seem wilful but here felt just.
Brandon Jovanovich as Sergey was for me the standout singer of the ensemble, singing with the lightness and upwards ease of a choral singer but the heft and phenomenal volume of a Held – quite a relief after his so-so performance in Gurre-Lieder with Mark Elder; perhaps opera is his bread and butter too. It remains an irrepressible pleasure to see John Tomlinson perform, and Boris is unsurprisingly just the kind of role he beasts, strained upper notes regardless. Similarly strained and sadly somewhat less pleasurable was Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title role; though at times she had the wonderful welly of old, and though the production plays to her strengths in so many ways, this didn’t feel like a settled performance. Among the smaller roles my feeling ranged from worry, about John Daszak as Zinovy – he sounded so strong as Herod in Salome but here struggled to be heard – to excited delight, about Aigul Akhmetshina as Sonyetka, once again showing herself to be a serious mezzo in the making.
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