Throughout the first act of Barrie Kosky’s new production of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Komische Oper Berlin, the audience stopped breathing. Not metaphorically. Literally. The applause that typically rustles through an audience during scene changes, that faint percussion of restlessness, simply did not happen. Everyone was simply too absorbed in the psychodrama evolving on stage. The proverbial pin-drop could have been heard.
At just 28 years old, Shostakovich took the story by Nikolai Leskow and composed his second opera. In 19th-century Russia, Katerina Ismailova, is a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a dull, impotent merchant. Neglected by her husband and brutalised by her tyrannical father-in-law, Boris, she falls into a passionate affair with Sergey, a charming itinerant worker on the estate. Their affair spirals into a series of unpremeditated murders as Katerina desperately clears a path to freedom and love. Betrayed in the end, she is arrested, marched to Siberia and destroyed.
Kosky and his stage designer Rufus Didwiszus have stripped the staging to almost nothing – a bed, a few tables, a bleak wash of dirty white wall – and in doing so have made the opera feel more physically dangerous than any production laden with elaborate sets could achieve. The final act, set in faraway frozen Siberia, is invoked by the mercilessness of a battery of cheap fluorescent lights, bearing down on the singers with a claustrophobic brutality that leaves nowhere to hide. Victoria Behr’s nondescript but appropriate mid-century costumes underline the timelessness of the story.
Kosky's direction keeps Katerina at the centre of every scene, and it is here that this production truly distinguishes itself. Soprano Ambur Braid brought to Katerina a ferocious emotional intelligence that was matched by an equal vocal range. She did not simply sing the role; she inhabited its full arc, from the aching quietude of Katerina's loneliness to the raw, animal fury that erupts when the world closes in on her. It was a performance that demanded, and earned, empathy, even when empathy is the last thing the material seems to invite.
Sean Panikkar, as the rakish Sergey, with a seductive tenorial timbre to match, struck the right balance of seduction and self-interest with just enough warmth to be believed, just enough calculation to be believed in. Tenor Elmar Gilbertsson, as Katerina's husband Zinoviy, provided an effective counterpoint: a man so thoroughly drained of vitality that his wife's frustration became viscerally understandable. By contrast, Dmitry Ulyanov's Boris – Zinoviy's father, the opera's true villain – arrived on stage as a force of nature. His bass was sonorous and carried an unmistakable sadistic edge. He also appeared as his own ghost, the doubling adding an unsettling continuity to the horror.
In the pit, James Gaffigan navigated a score of extraordinary emotional range with both authority and sensitivity. Shostakovich's orchestra is by turns grotesquely comic – the almost vaudeville treatment of the bumbling policemen – and devastatingly lyrical, as in the intimate, yearning passages in which Katerina sings of her empty life. Gaffigan let these contrasts breathe rather than flattening them and the result was a reading that functioned as a kind of emotional barometer, amplifying what the singers felt, but not overpowering them.
The Chorus of the Komische Oper deserves particular mention. In an opera that asks its ensembles to do far more than fill space – to embody the indifferent cruelty of a society that looks away – they delivered both vocally and theatrically, with a precision and commitment that elevated every scene they appeared in.
As the final curtain falls on that neon-lit Siberian wasteland, we cannot help but wonder what Shostakovich's operatic output might have become had Stalin’s infamous negative verdict in 1936 not stopped him composing any further operatic works. Judging by his symphonic output, it might have been extraordinary.
