“Hubble, bubble, budget trouble” might be the first thing on the minds of anyone considering presenting the Dmitri Shostakovich opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Its original, fully staged production runs for more than 21/2 hours, but Orchestra Wellington is performing it this month in a reduced version devised by music director Marc Taddei.
Before you think, “What – only two witches and half a ghost?”, be grateful that it has survived at all. Shostakovich’s groundbreaking opera was popular until its dramatic 1936 denunciation by the Soviets under Stalin. As those previously denounced had been taken away in the middle of the night never to be seen again, the hapless composer slept in his hallway for months with a small, packed suitcase so as not to disturb his family if that fateful knock at the door ever came. It didn’t.
Orchestra Wellington’s performance is the lynchpin of a season of concerts marking 50 years since Shostakovich’s death, says American-born Taddei. The season, ominously titled “The Dictator’s Shadow”, showcases important works from a tumultuous 15-year period in Shostakovich’s early life.
For Lady Macbeth, Taddei has trimmed the original 160 minutes down to a 65-minute suite that incorporates all nine scenes and all of heroine Katerina’s arias. They tell the story of a woman who falls in love with one of her husband’s workers and has her spouse murdered, eventually ending up in a Siberian gulag.
For Katerina, Taddei went to soprano Madeleine Pierard, his collaborator in Orchestra Wellington’s Wozzeck in 2023, who is billed by the orchestra as “clearly the go-to singer for tortured female icons of the modernist era”.
Singing Katerina is “a thrill and a huge challenge” Pierard says. “She’s raw, complicated and devastatingly human.”
She heaps praise on Taddei’s adventurous programming: “It’s a rare privilege to bring such a wild, unflinching piece to life.”
The whole opera seems to be tortured with its mushroom poisonings and strangulation, not to mention sex scenes, which Shostakovich depicted so graphically that a New York reviewer coined an entirely new term for it: “pornophony”. Even the Financial Times suggested that for bad sex, Shostakovich couldn’t be beaten.
Orchestra Wellington: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Michael Fowler Centre, October 18, 7.30pm. Also featuring Next Planet, by John Psathas; Concerto for Violin op 82 in A minor, by Alexander Glazunov.
