Khovanskygate, Birmingham Opera Company, review: 'bold and energetic'

Nobody knows quite what to make of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, rendered here as Khovanskygate by Birmingham Opera Company. A chronicle of the birth of modern Russia, in which the crucial character of Peter the Great never appears and the moral compass swerves between scheming barons, impotent liberals and diehard fundamentalists, it’s a sprawling mess littered with loose ends and open holes, left unresolved at the composer’s alcoholic death. Don’t look for heroes here, and don’t look for perfect plotting either.

Yet for all its longueurs, inconsistencies and confusions, it blazes with a grandeur which elevates it to the highest rank of 19th-century opera, and Graham Vick’s boldly conceived and energetically executed production for Birmingham Opera Company confronts the challenges it poses head-on.

Using a broad brush and not overly fussing about the detail, Vick and his translator Max Hoehn transfer the power politics into contemporary terms, clearly referring to Putin’s dark arts but also drawing parallels with extremist nationalist movements in Europe and the religious Right of America.

The audience promenades through the inside of a circus tent, where designer Samal Blak creates a space in which an election rally is taking place. Video screens broadcast news of crisis, protest and repression, as shifting factions and coalitions result in scandalous back-stabbing mayhem. Of only one thing you can be sure: those with real principles will not survive.

Mussorgsky ends the opera with the mass suicidal immolation of the Slavist Old Believers, whose creed contained pagan as well as Christian elements. Here they become anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage evangelicals suffocating themselves with plastic bags, which isn’t quite the same thing.

But Vick unfailingly makes the thing work theatrically, using the vault of the tent with irresistible imaginative panache to force home the bleak message that society is murderous chaos, and politics just a blunt weapon in the war to survive.

A crisply enunciating and vocally adequate cast is led by Claudia Huckle and Keel Watson as the leaders of the Old Believers, with Eric Greene and Joseph Guyton as the clashing Khovansky brothers; the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Stuart Stratford works wonders in a problematic environment.

But the evening’s most impressive element is the huge amateur chorus embodying the people who are the ultimate victims of all the shenanigans. Previous BOC productions have given “community groups” only a peripheral role to play, but here, performing with passionate enthusiasm and commitment, they become the show’s motivating force.

Until May 2; 0121 200 2727; birminghamopera.org,uk

READ: The opera world's Oscars are a reminder of a vibrant scene