La Scala season opens with Shostakovich’s visceral Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Conducting his last opening night as music director, Riccardo Chailly gave listeners a performance to remember
As a centrepiece of the ongoing Shostakovich anniversary, the choice of opera was as audacious as it was obvious. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk — the Russian composer’s towering 1934 work with graphic adultery, multiple murders and an orchestral score that leaves little to the imagination — fell foul of the Soviet censors and was dismissed as “pornography”. Yet here it was on the opening night of La Scala’s season, a high-stakes highlight of the Italian cultural calendar attended by the political elite and beamed to millions of television viewers nationwide.
The subject matter is hardly light entertainment. Katerina, a lonely merchant’s wife in rural 19th-century Russia, makes off with the newly employed workman, Sergei, before poisoning her father-in-law, Boris, and strangling her husband, Zinovy, whose corpse she hides in the cellar. Days after Stalin stormed out of a 1936 performance, Pravda denounced the work as “muddle instead of music”. Now, 50 years since Shostakovich’s death, one might have imagined similarly scandalised audience members — at an event often more memorable for offstage pageantry (police in plumed hats, paparazzi crushes and celebrities brandishing tickets worth €3,200) than the opera production itself.
Not this year. Director Vasily Barkhatov, the Russian director making his house debut, updates the action to a restaurant during the dying days of Stalinism, dividing the action between a monumental dining hall and a seedy back of house with an upper kitchen and a cellar below. By way of an effective flashback device, suspects and witnesses relive unspeakable crimes during police interrogations, giving events a grim inevitability. While families watching on TV are spared onstage sex, the fully clothed Katerina and Sergei re-enact the scene as officers take photos and Shostakovich’s score pants and grunts. The result is doubly disturbing.
Barkhatov showcases mastery of detail, weaving black humour — restaurant staff bungling a dead body through a jammed door, or blithely sweeping a floor as their poisoned employer writhes — with imagery so sleazy you are left wanting a shower. A gang of chefs overpower the workwoman Aksinya in the kitchen while a priest downs vodka in the cellar. When a creeping Zinovy secretly catches Katerina and Sergei in the act, the subsequent intermezzo preceding their apparent discovery sounds especially sinister.
Conducting his last opening night as music director after nearly a decade in the role, Riccardo Chailly gave listeners a performance to remember. He sands down Shostakovich’s rough edges — La Scala’s luminous strings at times have a Mahlerian quality — while suffusing gorgeously sculpted interludes with aching despair and black doom. At times, playing was astonishingly intense. Lined up on the restaurant’s mezzanine to salute Boris’s coffin below, brass players unleashed a wave of visceral rage that stays with you long after the performance. The excellent chorus gave similarly powerful deliveries.
With his inky voice and domineering presence, Alexander Roslavets’s ferocious Boris conjured much of the performance’s brutality. Yevgeny Akimov’s fluttering tenor made for a comically dithering Zinovy. Najmiddin Mavlyanov’s strapping Sergei was equally believable as seducer and swindler. As Katerina, Sara Jakubiak had little trouble standing out from the coterie of despicable males, keeping listeners gripped right until her shocking final self-immolation in place of the libretto’s river drowning.