Word: shostakovich
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...impotent score is loutish when it is not downright sullen. The finale-in which the degenerate playwright Quilty scrambles around his mansion in a drugged stupor, stopping to pound out a few chords on his piano before Humbert Humbert (Per-Arne Wahlgren) shoots him-is a scene worthy of Shostakovich in his manic, trumpets-and-snare-drums mode, but all Schedrin can muster is forced-march noodlings. As for the vulgar libretto, Schedrin wrote it himself but neglected to secure rights from the Nabokov estate. The copyright problems were eventually sorted out with the stipulation that the opera...
...recordings, were discovered unmarked and unedited in the company's vaults in Holland in 1993 and were released earlier this fall with the imprimatur of the temperamental pianist. The music represents the heart of his repertoire: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Haydn, Weber, Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. There is probably no better compendium of Richter...
Composed in 1932, Dmitri Shostakovich's second and last opera is one of the finest scores of the 20th century, a passionate and bawdy setting of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 short story. This tale of a frustrated, lascivious and ultimately homicidal rural housewife and her working-class lover boosted Shostakovich's art to a new level of technical assurance and emotional maturity, and at age 25 he appeared well on his way to becoming the most important operatic composer of the century. Then, in 1936, the Soviet authorities denounced the popular Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as "muddle instead of music...
...well it should. Shostakovich's first impulses retain their power to shock and thrill even after 60 years, and the elements that so offended Stalin -- the detumescent sound of the slide trombones in the rape scene, or the drunken peasant's breakdown after he discovers the corpse of Katerina's husband -- still pack a wallop...
With an unfamiliar opera that is as powerful as Lady Macbeth, a radical staging is hardly necessary to create freshness and vigor in a production. Shostakovich's music can do that very well on its own, and all of Vick's efforts are more a hindrance than a help...