Mussorgsky, Khovanshchina: (New Production premiere - sung in English) Soloists, Orchestra and Chorus of Welsh National Opera, Lothar Koenigs (conductor) Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff 17.02.2007 (BK)

 

 

 Cast

Prince Ivan Khovansky: Robert Hayward

Prince Andrei Khovansky: Tom Randle

Prince Vasily Golitsyn: Peter Hoare

Shaklovity: Peter Sidhom

Dosifei: Julian Close

Marfa: Rosalind Plowright

Susanna: Suzanne Murphy

Emma: Natash Jouhi

Persian Slave : Beate Vollack

Varsonofev: Alastair Moore

Kuzka: Luis Rodriguez

Streshnev: Alun Rhys Jenkins

1st Streltsy: Robert Winslade Anderson

2nd Streltsy: Martin Lloyd

Servant: Howard Kirk

Production

Conductor : Lothar Koenigs
Director: David Pountney
Designer: Johan Engels
Costumes: Marie-Jeanne Lecca
Lighting: Fabrice Kebour
Guest Chorus Master: Stephen Harris

 

Luis Rodriguez (Kuzka) and the WNO Chorus

The great flaw in this  English production was  performing the work without surtitles : when 90% of the words are inaudible, seeing them printed would have been helpful. Though   Tom Randle,  Peter Hoare and Adrian Thompson could all be heard clearly,  almost every other singer was unintelligible, straining attention to the limit and making the evening exhausting.  

 

The harsh conclusion about such singing would say that hardly anyone was adequate to their tasks, but it may be that balance with the orchestra was the real problem: Khovanshchina's cast is substantial and the work needs a large orchestra and chorus. While Lothar Koenigs seemed to manage the orchestra adequately and while some of the music is certainly  loud,  requiring the soloists and chorus to sing constantly at full tilt meant that diction went out of the window. Surtitled Russian would be easier on the ears.

 

 

Robert Hayward (Prince Ivan Khovansky)

This opera's plot is complicated. The reform-minded Peter the Great attacks and defeats the conservative streltsy, a band of ill-disciplined troops led by Ivan Khovansky. Matters are complicated by religious sect called the Old Believers who consider Peter to be the Anti-Christ and a relationship between Khovansky's son Andrei and the gypsy woman Marfa, an Old Believer herself, links the two opposition groups together.

An anonymous letter from the Boyar Shaklovity prompts the Czar's attack, the defeat of the Khovanskys and also the exile of the self-serving moderniser Prince Golitsyn. In the face of the irresistible power of the Czar after Ivan Khovansky is killed, the Old Believers burn themselves to death (or gas themselves in this production) as an act of salvation and as a protest against the 'Anti-Christ's' reforms. With his father dead and his lover Emma lost to him, Prince Andrei joins Marfa  in the Old Believers'  sacrifice.

 

Suzanne Murphy (Susanna) and Rosalind Plowright (Marfa)

 

It's a grim story set to marvellous music and David Pountney sees it as relevant to the modern world - to Putin's Russia and to the rise of religious extremism as a force in modern politics. Quite why that thought makes him set the action in post-revolutionary Russia is something of a mystery however, since more immediately relevant times and locations spring to mind fairly easily.

Johan Engels' set is a half-demolished library or courtroom where a wrecking ball hangs in one corner. All action takes place in this space, including the scene where Ivan Khovansky is murdered in his bath. Disorder and decadent immorality are clearly the order of the day, with a gratuitous attempted rape by Andrei on his lover Emma, and with Khovansky's Persian Slave pole-dancing around a shower pipe before her drugged and drunken master is killed. The 'Old Believers' moral choices seem fairly dubious.

 

As an interpretation of Mussorgsky's historical setting, David Pountney's idea is reasonable if not exactly bold. The set is cluttered with heaps of debris and  there's a great deal of extraneous stage business, which not only takes liberties with the text - why is the Scribe hoisted up on a hook to retrieve a very small book containing the 'proclamation'  that the chorus sings about in Scene 1 for instance? - but which adds to the confusion created by the generally poor diction. Despite its attractive music, Khovanshchina doesn't need these discomforts: added up they make a long 3½ hours.

 

 

 

Bill Kenny


Pictures © Clive Barda