The week in classical: Khovanshchina; Carmen review – the parallels with modern Russia are unmissable

The Guardian

19-04-2025

Dawn over the Moskva River. The bells of the Kremlin, deep and massive, toll. Red Square, deserted in the early morning, is pocked with the violence of a mob uprising the night before. Russia is in turmoil. So begins Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81), unfinished at his death from alcoholic delirium at the age of 42, and one of the unsolved riddles of the operatic repertoire. This grand, sprawling work opened the 2025 Salzburg Easter festival, well suited to this year's theme of 'wounds and wonders', in a compelling new production conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and performed by an international cast and musicians from Salonen's homeland, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
With sleuth-like determination over eight years and counting, he and a creative team led by the British fraternal partnership of director Simon McBurney and composer Gerard McBurney – fondly referred to in Salzburg as the McBrothers – presented a world-premiere staging of a new version of the opera. Originally intended for the Bolshoi theatre, Moscow in 2020, first Covid and then the invasion of Ukraine put paid to any such plan. Khovanshchina is steeped in the Russian psyche. Mussorgsky, grappling with his country's schismatic social and religious history, saw the past in the present. Using factual sources, he wrote his own idiosyncratic libretto, taking the so-called Khovansky Affair of the late 17th century as his starting point: Old Believers rise up against the westernising reforms of a regime that would lead to the rule of Peter the Great.
The parallels with modern Russia are unmissable but not exact. This opera has no heroes. The sight, on the Salzburg stage, of a clean-shaven politician in grey suit, standing at a lectern in front of a replica of the Bolshoi curtain issuing diktats, needs no comment. The feudal lord Khovansky (Vitalij Kowaljow), facing death and festering in a self-indulgence of lust and drugs, has conspicuous oligarchic tendencies. Make your own connections. Every character is an embodiment of a ruthless faction seeking dominion, expressed through the raw melodies that are Mussorgsky's hallmarks, the drama always driven by the music, liturgical chant dipping in and out of folk song and sung-speech patterns. Epic and populous choruses (superbly sung by the Slovak Philharmonic Choir and others), also a key component of the composer's better-known masterpiece, Boris Godunov, hold up a mirror to the suffering of a nation.
Against this historical tapestry, one fictional role offers a change of pace: that of Marfa, Old Believer and clairvoyant, Mother Russia figure, lover of seemingly every man on the stage, now violent, now devout. She is played with exceptional vocal and dramatic brilliance by the young mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina, born in Moscow, living in Switzerland, in what is surely a career-making performance. Resonant and strong at the top of her range, rich and potent in the contralto low notes, she is pivotal, offering humanity and empathy. At the moment of apocalypse, when the Old Believers determine on mass suicide, she raises her arms as a shower of earth falls on her, one of many moments of beauty in a production unafraid of harsh, modern realities.
All the physical theatre strengths of Simon McBurney, best known for work with his company Complicité and a rare but probing visitor to opera (his stagings of Wozzeck for Aix-en-Provence and The Magic Flute for English National Opera, currently on at New York's Metropolitan Opera, have been triumphs), are brought into play, to bracing effect. In Rebecca Ringst's striking designs, which also use live video, the stage shifts from open space to steep rake to triangular compression, performers and chorus moving with fearless energy. In a large cast, Thomas Atkins, Ain Anger, Daniel Okulitch, Natalia Tanasii and Matthew White stood out.
The reconstruction by Gerard McBurney, as fiercely imaginative as it is resolutely faithful – every note written, in some form or other, by Mussorgsky – uses material discovered in a Russian museum in the 1960s, woven convincingly together with the rest. The ending by Stravinsky (made, when he was in the midst of The Rite of Spring, at the request of the impresario Diaghilev) and the 1959 orchestration by Shostakovich for a film, the basis of most modern performances, are used here. McBurney's new musical bridge provides a missing link to the opera's skein of broken threads. A reflection of the importance of this staging of Khovanshchina was the presence in Salzburg of every opera intendant of note, among them those from Munich, Aix, the Royal Opera and the New York Met, where the production will travel, probably in 2030. By then its relevance may be even more acute.
Bizet's Carmen, though minimally problematic in comparison, also exists in different versions. Damiano Michieletto's staging for the Royal Opera, revived by Dan Dooner, lacks focus and often looks chaotic, especially in crowd scenes. With Bizet's fertile score and the alluring 28-year-old Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina reprising her Carmen (apparently she will have sung it 100 times by the end of this season), there is much to enjoy. Despite an apology for illness, she still sang stunningly, even while lying on her back, and shimmied perfectly around her drooling menfolk. As Don José, the British tenor Freddie De Tommaso gradually relaxed to display his famed shining top notes and, as the role demands, an awkward, stiff pathos. This is not a vintage Carmen on stage, but the conducting of Mark Elder, pliant, springy and detailed, and the dazzling playing by the orchestra, reminded us anew of Bizet's short-lived but enduring genius.
Star ratings (out of five)Khovanshchina ★★★★★
Carmen ★★★
Khovanshchina is at the Salzburg Easter festival, Austria, until 21 April
Carmen is at the Royal Opera, London, until 3 July