Photograph by Monika Rittershaus
No, there aren’t any tap-dancing mushrooms. Most individuals will know Barrie Kosky from his 1920’s silent movie Magic Flute, with its phantasmagoric animations, or his brilliantly witty manufacturing of Shostakovich’s The Nostril. The lineup of tap-dancing noses, an apt metaphor for the surreal conformity of Soviet forms, epitomizes Kosky’s campy, subversive fashion. However Shostakovich’s second opera is a special beast altogether; primarily based on Nikolai Leskov’s novella, Girl Macbeth of Mtsensk isn’t an opera with many alternatives for sequined dance numbers.
However Kosky is a director with vary. His new manufacturing of Girl Macbeth for the Komische Oper Berlin is within the stark, unrelenting vein of his Salzburg Kát’a Kabanová or his Glyndebourne Dialogues des Carmélites. It resembles above all his Berlin Pélleas et Mélisande, which strips away the opera’s decadent symbolism to disclose the suffocating cruelty on the coronary heart of a dysfunctional marriage. In Kosky’s world, Shostakovich’s Katerina is Mélisande’s extra cynical cousin; brutalized and brutal, she is able to a viciousness Debussy’s heroine isn’t afforded.
Girl Macbeth is a stage work that nearly at all times works: Graham Vick on the Met, Richard Jones for Covent Backyard, Warlikowski in Paris, Kusej in Amsterdam all devastate and overwhelm in their very own approach. Even a late-career Kristine Opolais, yowling her approach by means of Shostakovich’s rating in naked toes, was a someway compelling expertise. However Kosky eschews the lurid and goes for a pointy austerity, and in doing so achieves one thing far scarier and way more surprising.
Photograph by Monika Rittershaus
The unit set options nothing quite a lot of tables, chairs, and a mattress in entrance of a wall of stifling concrete. It’s Kosky in spite of everything, so issues are by no means too drab. The twitchy choreography of the policemen brings a second of absurdity that casts the approaching brutality in ever higher aid, and it’s a intelligent thought to maneuver the interval to after the drunken peasant discovers Zinoviy’s physique. It permits for the primary half to finish with one of many opera’s most raucous orchestral interludes, displaying off conductor James Gaffigan and his orchestra on blistering kind — good factor his contract has simply been renewed for one more three years whereas he takes on Houston Grand Opera. Tenor Caspar Krieger elicits stomach laughs because the drunken peasant, hopping across the stage together with his pants round his ankles, humping Zinoviy’s corpse, and excitedly throwing flour across the stage. It’s surprising, surreal, and really, very humorous.
It’s this detailed characterization that brings the manufacturing to life, from the drunken malice of Krieger’s peasant to the way in which Mirka Wagner’s Aksinya gleefully spits on Sergei’s whipped physique after he rapes her. Dimitry Ivashchenko’s sonorous bass is luxurious casting because the priest and Susan Zarrabi is an appropriately malicious Sonyetka, spitting out the textual content and letting out some blood-curdling screams as Katerina strangles her along with her stockings. The Komische Oper’s refrain, too, is on glorious kind, with sufficient musical self-discipline to cleanly execute the choral fugue within the marriage ceremony scene. Kosky at all times attracts efficient choral stage photographs, whether or not within the frantic desperation of the prisoners in Siberia or the back-and-forth drudgery of the laborers towards which Katerina notices Sergei.
Photograph by Monika Rittershaus
It’s straightforward to see why Katerina notices him when the costume designer Victoria Behr and lighting designer Olaf Freese body Sean Pannikar’s biceps so lovingly. He’s definitely tall and good-looking sufficient for the function of Sergei, although it pushes his elegant lyric tenor to its very limits. He’s an impressive actor although, simmering with insecurity and violence beneath his swaggering exterior. As Zinoviy, Elmar Gilbertsson’s slim, compact tenor typically pales subsequent to Dmitry Ulyanov’s Boris, whose booming sound and imposing presence is spectacular.
However it was Ambur Braid’s present, and her ferocious Katerina might very nicely be the factor that catapults her into stardom. It’s onerous to consider that it’s been simply over a decade since I heard the Canadian soprano sing the Queen of the Night time, Semele, and a Fledermaus’ Adele, and there’s positively one thing of the Anja Silja about her in her vocal and dramatic fearlessness. It’s a pleasure to listen to the function sung by somebody of their vocal prime — I’ve heard too many a soprano scoop her approach by means of Boris’ lament — and Braid soprano’s has ample energy from a piercing higher register right down to a zesty chest voice in addition to glorious intonation and clear vocal assaults. She’s additionally an exceptional actor, fearlessly contorting her physique and face to precise Katerina’s frustration, clinginess, and cruelty. The stillness she achieves within the last scene is terrifying, with a psychopathic glint in her eye earlier than she explodes in violence with such ferocity that the girl beside me screamed. That’s the precise response this opera deserves.
