The Left-Hander review – finely played and sung, but it’s no masterpiece

Given its UK premiere by the Mariinsky and Valery Gergiev as part of their current tour, The Left-Hander is the latest opera by Rodion Shchedrin, a variable composer whose music Gergiev has repeatedly championed.

Its source is a satirical 1881 short story by Nikolai Leskov, about a naive, left-handed metalworker, caught up in an absurd game of Anglo-Russian one-upmanship that begins when Tsar Alexander I, on a visit to London, is presented with a singing clockwork flea, which in turn kicks off an imperial obsession with Russian craftsmen being better than their English counterparts. The Left-Hander eventually proves the tsar right, but is then left by the system to die, alone and neglected, once he has served his purpose.

Leskov’s tale is funny and ferocious. Shchedrin dilutes both its fury and its wit by shifting its emphasis. Religious imagery in the text, and evocations of both Orthodox church music and Bach’s passions in the score, make the Left-Hander a martyr rather than a victim, and transform the initial mood of protest into one of tragic resignation.

But it’s no masterpiece. Striking orchestral and vocal effects are offset by a more than occasional thinness of melodic and thematic inspiration. Some of it is rather dull.

The premiere started an hour late after an announcement that Gergiev had been “unavoidably delayed by circumstances beyond his or our control” – back pain, I gather, though nobody bothered to offer the increasingly fractious audience any sort of official explanation.

The performance was finely played and sung. Tenor Andrey Popov was the touching if occasionally effortful Left-Hander. The Flea’s utterances are sung by a coloratura soprano – ravishingly, in this instance, by Kristina Alieva. Vladimir Moroz had fun as the various tsars. But it by no means engaged everyone’s imagination, and quite a few people left in the interval.