Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
At first glance, the title of Shostakovich's opera seems to speak for itself: Katherina, neglected and unhappy in her marriage, commits the most heinous crime just like the Shakespearian Lady MacBeth. But Nikolai Leskov's short novel, which portrays Kathe

REVIEW
It's been nearly three years since the Canadian Opera Company's gut-wrenchingly satisfying production of Dmitri Shostakovich's 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Since the work isn't produced often, any opportunity to see it on DVD is worth checking out. This 2008 production from the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence doesn't disappoint.

American conductor James Conlon brings out every nuance in Shostakovich's score, which beautifully underlines the drama unleashed by a solid cast led by dramatic-voiced Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet as Katerina, a bourgeois woman who takes up with another man while her husband is away.

Think of this long, four-act opera as Desperate Housewives set in a late-19th-century Russian backwater: Bored housewife meets handsome drifter, she kills her husband, the adulterers are sent to a prison camp, Katerina sees her new husband eyeing another woman and pushes the woman into the Volga river before throwing herself in, too.

It's not light entertainment, but there's a lot to savour in a fine production. Director Lev Dodin and designer David Borovsky have kept it simple, if exceedingly drab, focusing everything on the main characters. If there is one flaw, it's a lack of electricity between Charbonnet and tenor Sergei Kunaev, who plays her lover. There are no extras in this two-DVD set. -- Thestar.com, John Terauds, January 12, 2010

Actors: Jeanne Michèle Charbonnet, Vsevolod Grivnov, James Conlon, Sergej Kunaev, Vladimir Vaneev

Audio Languages: Russian

Duration: 170 minutes

Number of Discs: 2

Subtitle Languages: German, English, Russian, Italian, French, Spanish

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