Bullying, sexual violence, love-starved relationships, murder and desperate, unending boredom. Never mind trigger warnings: these are the narrative pillars of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the opera decried by Stalin as “muddle instead of music”. Stalin’s sudden condemnation was thoroughly political, of course – but British music critics were similarly taken aback after the first UK performance in 1936. “Some of it is clever parody, but much of it is crude,” sniffed the Daily Mail. Almost 90 years later, the opera remains unequivocally grim.
Like its UK premiere, this Proms outing was a concert performance in English translation. Without the trappings of a full staging or the linguistic buffer of the original Russian libretto, the nastiness of this tale of a rape that starts an affair that leads to two murders seemed even more inescapable than usual. Ruth Knight’s semi-staging involved minimal paraphernalia – an iron bed, a small table, a wooden witness box – but used lighting to melodramatic effect. Harsh spotlights isolated characters. The digital screens behind the performers switched several times to blinding white, transforming the Chorus of English National Opera Chorus into a mob in silhouette. The entire stage was bathed periodically in red.
No wonder the audience giggled as Nicky Spence’s Sergey muttered “Now we’re really in the shit,” as the betrayed husband approached the lovers’ bedroom: light relief was in distinctly short supply. For all that Shostakovich called the piece a “tragic satire” and included numerous lively musical parodies – of ballroom dances and operetta, circus music and brass-band oompah – conductor John Storgårds kept the BBC Philharmonic deadly serious. There were rude bassoons (grittily flatulent in their lowest register) and even ruder, detumescent trombones, strings that waltzed and woodwind that fidgeted. But Storgårds allowed no levity. Long stretches of the score function as mid-century modern wallpaper, the orchestra ticking over in the background, as restless as the heroine. Occasionally, Storgårds coaxed quiet passages of stunning tenderness; but climaxes crashed relentlessly in vast waves of blaring brass and vicious timpani strokes.
That the solo voices struggled at times to compete only added to the performance’s increasingly acute claustrophobia. Brindley Sherratt was on rich-voiced, characterful form as Boris, the piece’s appalling patriarch. As his son and the heroine’s husband, John Findon had both the vocal power and imposing stage presence to resist any suspicion that the character is purely a pushover. There were impressive contributions from Ava Dodd and Niamh O’Sullivan as alternative lust-objects. But nothing was more striking or disturbing than the interaction between Spence’s Sergey and Amanda Majeski’s Katerina: the former heroically clarion even while dramatically faithless, the latter a terrifyingly lyrical portrait of a woman “so bored I could hang myself” – or, as it turns out, commit murder.