"For our first big Russian opera, there was one candidate," says Birmingham Opera Company's artistic director Graham Vick. But Khovanshchina – as it is usually known in English – is a daunting undertaking for any fully staffed opera house (just three previous homegrown British productions in the last 50 years), let alone an organisation such as BOC that relies on bringing together a vast range of both professional and amateur performers and backstage workers for each of its site-specific shows.
In fact, getting to the first night of Khovanskygate: A National Enquiry, as Mussorgsky's epic becomes in this English version, has been more fraught than usual. Vick's production had to be moved and redesigned (by Samal Blak) in just a few weeks, when the original venue was abandoned for safety reasons. It now occupies a huge tent in an Edgbaston park, with the orchestra, the full might of the City of Birmingham Symphony, powerfully conducted by Stuart Stratford and stationed on a gantry above the action. The audience move from scene to scene around the performing space in now-familiar BOC style. There's plenty of scope for the massive choral effects and dramatic set-pieces, the marches and riots, that are the company's trademark – opera as Cecil B DeMille might have imagined it.
The resonances of updating to today's Russia the story of the struggle for political and religious dominance from the time of Peter the Great are obvious enough, though most of the visual references – the police uniforms; the Debenhams carrier bag touted by Paul Nilon's investigative journalist; the TV news channel constantly playing in the office of Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts's Golitsyn, and so on – are clearly British. Whether that universalises the work's bleakness (underlined by the inclusion of the final chorus that Stravinsky added to the score for a 1913 performance), or adds one gloss too many on to what is always a difficult narrative to untangle, is another matter.
Words come and go, depending on where different scenes are placed, but musical standards and the quality of individual performances are both extraordinarily high. The Khovanskys, Ivan and Andrei, father and son, are played as smooth political operators by Eric Greene and Joseph Guyton, with Robert Winslade Anderson as Shaklovity, the tsar's suave but ruthless enforcer. Best of all are Keel Watson as a bold messianic Dosifei, leader of the ultra-conservative, anti-abortion, anti-gay True Believers, and Claudia Huckle as his daughter Marfa, whose unswerving love for Andrei provides the emotional heart to what can be an intimidatingly unsparing work.
• On 24, 28, 30 April and 2 May. Box office: 0121-246 6632. Venue: Birmingham Opera
