Twelve years is a long wait between Royal Opera revivals of Shostakovich’s only “grand” opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. True, we had Mark Wigglesworth’s excoriating soundtrack to Dmitri Tcherniakov’s tame English National Opera staging in 2015, but even if Richard Jones’s RO production hasn’t entirely stood the test of time, the musical performance, led by Antonio Pappano, is the company’s best yet.
The revival makes even more of an impact now than when it was new, thanks to Pappano, whose interpretation of the lurid, sometimes raucous, in-yer-face score, featuring a riotously parodistic brass band, given onstage star billing here, has grown over three series of performances. His response to the anti-heroine’s tragic demise — a convict on her way to a gulag who drowns