A figure with the head of a doll plays with a multicoloured spinning top, high above the stage. Three men – hooded and armed – creep forwards and seize him, slashing his throat and dragging him off.
It’s a brutal start to a brutal opera. This flashback is the brainchild of director Richard Jones (in his 2016 Royal Opera production, revived for the second time by Ben Mills, we see it replayed twice more as an episode that haunts the protagonist), but the overriding atmosphere is Mussorgsky’s. Based on Pushkin’s drama about a tsar’s reign, Boris Godunov is among the darkest of all operas. In the composer’s lean, mean original version, it is almost relentlessly so: dominated by low voices, its orchestration dense and heavy, the seven scenes push inexorably towards crisis.
