Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: A chilling take on Shostakovich’s masterpiece

In January 1994, a random electrical spark started a fire that destroyed much of Barcelona’s famous Liceu opera house, once the biggest in Europe. It took until 1999 to rebuild the theatre with a combination of restoration, recreation and new technology, since when it has been a leading artistic powerhouse. It has been sometimes quirky – during the pandemic, it mounted a performance for 2,292 house plants in the auditorium (they were then given to health-service workers) – and has always been artistically adventurous.

Typically, to mark the 25th anniversary of its reopening, it opted neither for a grand gala nor a popular classic, but instead mounted a radical new production of one of the 20th-century’s most controversial operas. Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was famously denounced in Pravda when premiered in 1934, after which it was condemned to silence; much later, in 1962, the composer revised and arguably weakened the opera, which allowed it to be performed in Russia, but since Shostakovich’s death in 1975 the stronger original version has been widely taken up.

The Liceu’s artistic director is Àlex Ollé, who was one of the radical music-theatre group La Fura dels Baus that became involved in opera productions around Europe. Ollé’s own stagings are technically inventive and always visually striking, and this Lady Macbeth is no exception: it is set among massive rusty hanging vertical panels like Richard Serra sculptures (designs by Alfons Flores) that move claustrophobically across the stage, hemming in the action.

You become aware that, perhaps prompted by the libretto’s evocation of an ominous lake, the floor is entirely water (an effect Ollé also used in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande), splashing and throwing shadowy ripples onto the bare panels that make it seem as though everything is submerged.

The emotions, however, are not submerged but instead unleashed in this staging of Katerina Ismailova’s brutal story of the unsatisfied wife who is led to an affair, murders and eventually suicide. Ollé’s take is that Katerina is exploited by male oppression: his Katerina, Sara Jakubiak (who was a standout Chrysothemis in Strauss’s Elektra here at Covent Garden) is repressed, fiery, furious, vividly acted and compellingly sung: she will surely now be in wide demand for this role.

As her lover who unlocks her passion (and not much is left to the imagination here), Pavel Ćernoch is forceful, but other male roles, such as Katerina’s first victim – her father-in-law Boris (Alexei Botnarciuc) to whom she feeds poisoned mushrooms and her second, her husband Zinovi (Ilya Selivanov) – seem deliberately downgraded as comic fools.

Not all of the solo singing is on the level of these principals, but this is an ensemble show with a committed chorus. The experienced conductor Josep Pons leads his orchestra strongly, with its shockingly literal interludes further animating the stage pictures of sex and violence. The final act, as beds float in the air and the exiled lovers head for their punishment, is harrowing; the opera ends ambiguously, with Katerina presumed drowned as she pushes a rival to her death, but in this production her end is self-inflicted and visible, the all-too-inevitable conclusion of a traumatised life.

Until Oct 7; liceubarcelona.cat