Review

WNO's Khovanshchina is a thrilling portrait of terror and brutality – review

Sara Fulgoni (Marfa) Claire Wilde (Emma) in Khovanshchina at the Wales Millennium Centre
Sara Fulgoni (Marfa) Claire Wilde (Emma) in Khovanshchina at the Wales Millennium Centre Credit: Clive Barda/WNO

Nobody could pretend that Khovanshchina offers easy entertainment. It’s a great rough beast of a drama – left unfinished at Mussorgsky’s drunken death, with a confusing plot and characters unsympathetic in their ruthless tunnel vision. But this superb revival of David Pountney’s masterly 2007 production for WNO reminds us that it is also a work of unique power and grandeur. 

The tangled story of the internecine struggles around the accession of Peter the Great makes House of Cards look like Andy Pandy. There are no winners in the feuds and intrigues between the tsar’s faction, the Old Believers, the repressive oligarchs and the westernising liberals, but the biggest losers are without doubt the Russian people, left out in the cold without hope or justice. No other opera deals more forcefully with the dirty business of politics, and the way that it muddies good and evil.

Robert Hayward (Prince Khovansky) and Elena Thomas (Persian Slave)
Robert Hayward (Prince Khovansky) and Elena Thomas (Persian Slave) Credit: Clive Barda/WNO

The almost cynical bleakness of the message is enriched by Mussorgsky’s raw yet full-blooded score, presented here in the version edited by Shostakovich (with a regrettable schlock ending added by Rimsky-Korsakov). WNO’s brilliant new Music Director Tomas Hanus brings out all the brazen primitivism in the harmonies and the impassioned lyricism in the vocal writing, as well as revelling in the sumptuous romanticism of the Overture and Dance of the Persian Slave (the latter strikingly performed with no holds barred by Beate Vollack). The orchestral playing is thrillingly pungent.

There are no obvious stars in the cast, and the smaller roles are taken with distinction by members of the company’s fabulous chorus – one who stands out in particular is Monika Sawa as the fanatic Susanna. Robert Hayward and Adrian Dwyer play the appalling Khovansky father and son; Mark Le Brocq is the effete Prince Golitsyn, Simon Bailey the cunning Boyar Shaklovity, and Miklos Sebestyen and Sara Fulgoni the backward-looking ascetics Dosifei and Marfa.

Monika Sawa (Susanna)
Monika Sawa (Susanna) Credit: Clive Barda/WNO

All of them offer strongly characterised and vocally vivid portrayals that inhabit a bold and vigorous staging evoking the tragic period in early Soviet history during which the brief liberations of Leninism rotted into the repressions of Stalinism. The historical analogies may not be strictly valid, but the sense of anarchy held at bay only by terror, brutality and corruption is all too resonant. This is opera on the moral edge, and it mesmerises.

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, until October 7, then touring to Llandudno and Birmingham. Tickets 029 2063 6464; wno.org.uk

 

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