Out, Damned Opera Director

By Michael Walsh

The Metropolitan Opera's new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is so bright, so impish and in its energy so reflective of the dazzling score it dramatizes that it's a shame to say that it represents a waste of talent. But it does.

Composed in 1932, Dmitri Shostakovich's second and last opera is one of the finest scores of the 20th century, a passionate and bawdy setting of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 short story. This tale of a frustrated, lascivious and ultimately homicidal rural housewife and her working-class lover boosted Shostakovich's art to a new level of technical assurance and emotional maturity, and at age 25 he appeared well on his way to becoming the most important operatic composer of the century. Then, in 1936, the Soviet authorities denounced the popular Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as "muddle instead of music." Afraid not only for his livelihood but for his life, Shostakovich withdrew the earthy score, replaced it with a pallid adaptation called Katerina Ismailova, and never wrote another opera. It was not until 1979 that the original work surfaced; gradually, it has been replacing its successor in the international repertoire.

As well it should. Shostakovich's first impulses retain their power to shock and thrill even after 60 years, and the elements that so offended Stalin -- the detumescent sound of the slide trombones in the rape scene, or the drunken peasant's breakdown after he discovers the corpse of Katerina's husband -- still pack a wallop.

Musically, the performance at the Met is excellent. Possessing a voice that is lithe and ripe, mezzo-soprano Maria Ewing was born to sing the title role, and she delivers a performance of untamed carnality. Slovak bass Sergei Koptchak is outstanding as her lecherous father-in-law, and Russian tenor Vladimir Galouzine is appropriately ardent as the lover. In the pit, conductor James Conlon and the Met orchestra rejoice in the score's raw power.

The production itself is another matter. Rather than trusting the music to make its effect, Graham Vick offers instead a cartoonish and superfluous gloss on the sardonic opera. Vick, the director of productions for the Glyndebourne Festival, and his all-British production team have set the action in the deprived consumer hell of the Soviet 1950s: Katerina's erotic fantasies, for example, run to materialistic visions of brides wielding vacuum cleaners. $ Symbols of heavy industry like cranes, tractors and forklifts move props (such as Katerina's marital bed) on and off stage, and Katerina's feckless husband is buried in the trunk of a car crushed by a wrecker's ball.

With an unfamiliar opera that is as powerful as Lady Macbeth, a radical staging is hardly necessary to create freshness and vigor in a production. Shostakovich's music can do that very well on its own, and all of Vick's efforts are more a hindrance than a help.