Bullying, sexual violence, love-starved relationships, murder and desperate, unending boredom. Never mind trigger warnings: these are the narrative pillars of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the opera decried by Stalin as “muddle instead of music”. Stalin’s sudden condemnation was thoroughly political, of course – but British music critics were similarly taken aback after the first UK performance in 1936. “Some of it is clever parody, but much of it is crude,” sniffed the Daily Mail. Almost 90 years later, the opera remains unequivocally grim.
Like its UK premiere, this Proms outing was a concert performance in English translation. Without the trappings of a full staging or the linguistic buffer of the original Russian libretto, the nastiness of this tale of a rape that starts an affair that leads to two murders seemed even more inescapable than usual. Ruth Knight’s semi-staging involved minimal paraphernalia – an iron bed, a small table, a wooden witness box – but used lighting to melodramatic effect. Harsh spotlights isolated characters. The digital screens behind the performers switched several times to blinding white, transforming the Chorus of English National Opera into a mob in silhouette. The entire stage was bathed periodically in red.
