Performing Shostakovich has been one of Andris Nelsons’ calling cards during his first decade as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What began as a project to survey all of the symphonies, with recordings of them subsequently released by Deutsche Grammophon, was extended to include all the concertos, and ended in spectacular fashion in January last year with concert performances of Shostakovich’s most ambitious and controversial stage work, the 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Surprisingly for a work of such notoriety and historical significance, this is just the fourth recording of Lady Macbeth (there’s also one available version of Katerina Izmailova, the revision of the score that Shostakovich produced in 1962 in an attempt to rehabilitate it with the Soviet authorities after its official condemnation in 1936). But unfortunately this new version, taken from one of the Boston performances, does not seriously challenge the existing choices.
Oddly, each of the three previous commercial recordings, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Myung-whun Chung and Ingo Metzmacher respectively, all take exactly the same time over the complete opera: 155 minutes. Here, Nelsons takes a whole 20 minutes longer. Though few passages seem to drag unduly, the difference in timings does confirm a lassitude in his performance; despite some of the individual contributions, there’s a flatness to the proceedings, a lack of urgency, that undermines their dramatic impact.
And, even though there’s no shortage of loud, brash playing, Nelsons and the BSO tend to neuter a score that includes some of Shostakovich’s most savagely ironic and parodic invention, a radical extreme from which he was forced to retreat. Hearing this account of the score, it’s sometimes hard to understand why it should have offended Stalin so much. And while Kristine Opolais has her moments in the title role, her characterisation of Katerina is rather one-dimensional, doing a good line in the character’s self-pity but little else. Brendan Gunnell is plausible enough as her lover Sergey, Peter Hoare suitably complaisant as her husband, Zinovy, with Günther Groissböck completing the menage à quatre as her bullying father-in-law Boris.
All in all it’s a disappointing ending to the Boston Shostakovich series.
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