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The Guardian
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: Khovanshchina; Carmen review – the parallels with modern Russia are unmissable
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
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘So resonant': the 19th-century Russian opera being revived across Europe
A Russian political leader sings about war with Ukrainians and the need for a 'durable peace'. The fractured political elite argues over whether they should pursue closer ties with Europe or embrace Russian traditions. The plot of Modest Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina was written in the 1870s and is set in the 1680s. But, as the characters lament the fact that their homeland is mired in an endless cycle of violence and unhappiness, the dark and brooding work can feel alarmingly contemporary. That may explain why productions of the long and complicated opera, which covers a period of political unrest that few outside Russia are familiar with and which used to be performed rarely in the west, are now springing up across Europe. Last summer, a staging at the Staatsoper in Berlin opened with a scene set in the modern-day Kremlin, with the entire action recast as a contemporary political re-enactment for propaganda purposes. Another new production premiered in Geneva last month with plenty of modern overtones: the character of a 17th-century scribe was portrayed as a hacker, sitting in an office chair as long lines of Russian computer code appeared on giant screens behind him. Later, the same screens showed video footage of the main characters debating, as if on state television political talkshows. Next week, yet another production of Khovanshchina will premiere at the Salzburg Easter festival, staged by the British director Simon McBurney. He said his production would be 'very much about today' rather than a historical recreation, and described the opera as 'hauntingly beautiful, and sometimes terrifying', in a video interview in between rehearsals. Photographs from dress rehearsals in Salzburg showed characters in strikingly modern dress, and McBurney said one of the key influences on his thinking for how to conceptualise the opera was a policy speech Vladimir Putin gave at the Bolshoi theatre some years ago. In fact, McBurney's original plan had been to put it on at the Bolshoi in 2022, in what would have been one of the first times a foreign director had staged a Russian classic on the country's most hallowed stage. McBurney worked on plans for the staging over many years with his brother, Gerard, a composer who spent time in Russia and has re-orchestrated the finale of the opera, which exists in many different versions because Mussorgsky left it unfinished. But the full-scale invasion of Ukraine made that plan untenable. The Bolshoi has since been taken over by the Putin loyalist Valery Gergiev, and late last year revived a hyper-traditional production of Khovanshchina with a set design first used in 1952. McBurney took his ideas to Salzburg, in what is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera that will later be staged in New York. Rehearsal photos show a Putin-like suited politician giving a speech from a lectern featuring a modern Russian coat of arms, in front of a mock-up of the Bolshoi's distinctive stage curtain. 'I don't know how it might have gone down when I was going to do it in Moscow. I don't know what the consequence would have been for me. I'm very sad that we're not able to do it in the Bolshoi,' he said. Although productions of Khovanshchina inside Russia still tend to feature period sets and costumes, there is plenty in the opera that lends itself to a modern re-imagination. 'If you changed a few names in the libretto, it would describe current events. I can't think of any other opera where that would be the case,' said Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor of the Salzburg production. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion Calixto Bieito, the Spanish director behind the recent production in Geneva, said he wanted to leave some of the contemporary relevance to the imagination of viewers. 'Of course when you read the text you cannot avoid making connections with the present day, but those are connections for the audience to make, not for me,' he said in an interview before the premiere in Geneva. Still, the production was peppered with references to contemporary Russia. Not every opera house feels the time is right to stage Russian historical dramas. The Polish National Opera was due to stage Boris Godunov, another brooding meditation on power by Mussorgsky, in March 2022, but cancelled the run after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 'At times like these, opera is silent … Let our silence speak of our solidarity with the people of Ukraine,' Mariusz Treliński, the theatre's artistic director, said at the time. The opera was again scheduled for the 2024-25 season but conditional on the war in Ukraine ending; as that did not happen, it was again removed, and a spokesperson for the theatre said it was 'hard to say if or when' the production would run. But farther west in Europe, there have been fewer qualms about staging Russian works, further evidenced by news this week that Ralph Fiennes would direct Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Paris next year. In June, the exiled Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov will stage Boris Godunov in Amsterdam. According to the website of the Dutch National Opera, he will 'incorporate his own experiences in Russia in this highly topical production'. Serebrennikov led one of Moscow's most successful theatres and mounted several opera productions at the Bolshoi before he was arrested in 2017, and spent nearly two years under house arrest before being freed. When it comes to Khovanshchina, which ends with the mass suicide of a religious sect by self-immolation, despite the firm Russian context there was also something more universal about the work, said McBurney. People were currently experiencing a 'perception of history', he said, and there was a sense in the air that we were on the brink of major change, just as there was when Mussorgsky was writing in the late 19th century. 'We are aware of a wave, and we don't quite know what form it's going to take, whether it's going to be a sudden acceleration of ecological disaster, or whether it's going to take the form of human violence, we don't know. But we do feel the wave, and in some sense that is why [the opera] is so resonant. You can feel the impending disaster,' he said.
