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Eye on Arts

2.12.04

Femme Fatale
Contributed by Charles T. Downey at 9:57 AM | Link to this article
Raymond Stults, Femme Fatale (Context: The Moscow Times, November 26)

After decades of censorship, "Lady Macbeth" returns to the Bolshoi as, the theater hopes, Shostakovich meant it to be.

For its first new production of the current season last Friday, the Bolshoi Theater brought to its main stage Dmitry Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," in a performance of the highest order. Unhappily, the musical excellence was offset by a staging that misfired at many critical moments.

Of the 20 solo parts in "Lady Macbeth," not one was filled with a voice less than adequate, but Tatyana Anisimova as Katerina Ismailova (the Lady Macbeth of the title) and Vadim Zaplechny as Katerina's lover, Sergei, soared above the rest in the central roles. Based in Kiev, but enlisted last season by the Bolshoi for the title part in Giacomo Puccini's "Turandot," Anisimova has just the sort of voice that Katerina requires -- a firm, bright, superbly controlled dramatic soprano. Added to that, she brings to the part the very qualities that the composer, who regarded the homicidal Katerina as a true heroine, would probably have admired -- passion, dignity and grace.

Zaplechny, making his Bolshoi debut, has long ranked among the Helikon Opera's finest singing actors. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that the Bolshoi took so much time to discover him, as it has not boasted a dramatic tenor with a voice of equal quality -- much less with Zaplechny's acting abilities -- for more than a decade. As those who have seen and heard him at the Helikon could readily have predicted, Zaplechny sang Sergei with clarity from top to bottom and played the part with utter conviction.

In the pit, conductor Zoltan Pesko, a well-seasoned veteran of the European operatic circuit, provided Shostakovich's marvelous score with authoritative leadership and drew playing of a richness and accuracy the orchestra rarely displays.

As for the staging, the best that can be said for it is that the director, Timur Chkheidze, succeeded in creating an array of sharply defined characters. What he failed to do, more often than not, was bring those characters together in meaningful fashion. The obvious comparison is Dmitry Bertman's production of "Lady Macbeth" at the Helikon, which garnered no less than four Golden Mask awards in 2001. At almost every crucial point, Bertman found a solution far more in keeping with the music and the libretto that Shostakovich wrote in collaboration with poet Alexander Preis.

Take, for instance, the attempted gang-rape of the servant girl Aksinya in the opera's second scene. Helikon's staging left not the slightest doubt as to what was happening. At the Bolshoi, it all looked like harmless fun. Beyond that, neither the murders of the elder Ismailov and his son, Zinovy, nor the lovemaking of Katerina and Sergei came across on the Bolshoi stage with anything approaching the conviction Bertman brought to them. The intertwined scenes of the third act -- the lovers' wedding banquet, the discovery of Zinovy's body, the comical dance of the police patrol and the eventual arrest of Katerina and Sergei -- seemed little more than a stately parade of events. The Helikon, meanwhile, gave full rein to their inherent absurdity.

To frame the Bolshoi production, designer Yury Gegeshidze created a rustic wooden set, with wide slats at the rear and balconies on either side. This worked well enough as the Ismailov family home. But the trouble came in the final scene, when the action moved to the banks of the Volga River and the slats were replaced with a raised gangway and long staircase. Though the resemblance was doubtless unintentional, the slow march of the prisoners across the gangway and down to the stage looked like a parody of the Entrance of the Shades in the ballet "La Bayadere," while their crowding as they set off along the same route in reverse brought rush hour on a Moscow Metro escalator to mind.

Doing real damage to the drama, the gangway also served as the place from which Katerina threw herself and Sergei's other lover, Sonyetka, into the waters of the Volga. Carried off at a distance, in perfunctory fashion and half-hidden by a crowd of fellow prisoners, the opera's climactic moment probably escaped anyone who just then happened to blink.

Despite the drawbacks of its staging, the Bolshoi's "Lady Macbeth" -- which next appears in January -- is well worth a visit for its musical virtues. Be warned, however, that those virtues may be fully apparent only on evenings when Anisimova, Zaplechny and Pesko are all on hand. The alternate singers and conductors announced by the Bolshoi seem unlikely, based on past performances, to come close to matching them.

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