Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Written between 1930 and 1932, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was one of the most brilliant achievements of Shostakovich's long career. It                      was also the work that got him into trouble with Stalin. When the Soviet leader attended a performance in Moscow in 1936, almost two                      years after the opera's acclaimed Leningrad premiere, he personally ordered the publication of a scathing article in Pravda ("Muddle Instead                      of Music"), unleashing a ruthless campaign to reduce the arts in Soviet Russia to a state of dogmatic subservience to the regime. Lady                      Macbeth would disappear from the repertory for 30 years, and Shostakovich, despite his great gifts for opera, would focus his attention on                      symphonic and chamber music instead.But what an opera this one was! Notwithstanding its title, it has nothing to do with Shakespeare's Macbeth and quite a lot to do with                      Dostoevsky (even though it's based on a story by another 19th-century writer, Nikolai Leskov). The plot has all the elements of a Russian                      epic--boredom, need, irresistible sexual longing, infidelity, murder, suicide--and the music is vintage Shostakovich, swinging between farce                      and tragedy with astonishing sureness, magnificently intense, deeply absorbing, yet approachable. The opera's climactic scenes are driven by                      music of incredible power, and there are pages of haunting lyric beauty as well, such as Katarina's aria in scene 3, or the extraordinary                      music that begins the love scene between Katarina and Sergey--mysterious, edgy, sensuous, and vast. It's all brought home on this recording,                      a labor of love from two of the composer's closest friends and greatest champions. Vishnevskaya, the great exponent of the role of                      Katarina, sings with untrammeled splendor, while Rostropovich, the supreme interpreter of the music of Shostakovich in our time, conducts a                      characterful, white-hot performance by the London Philharmonic.--Ted Libbey