Photo by Monika Rittershaus

No, there are no tap-dancing mushrooms. Most people will know Barrie Kosky from his 1920’s silent film Magic Flute, with its phantasmagoric animations, or his brilliantly witty production of Shostakovich’s The Nose. The lineup of tap-dancing noses, an apt metaphor for the surreal conformity of Soviet bureaucracy, epitomizes Kosky’s campy, subversive style. But Shostakovich’s second opera is a different beast altogether; based on Nikolai Leskov’s novella, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk isn’t an opera with many opportunities for sequined dance numbers.

But Kosky is a director with range. His new production of Lady Macbeth for the Komische Oper Berlin is in the stark, unrelenting vein of his Salzburg Kát’a Kabanová or his Glyndebourne Dialogues des Carmélites. It resembles above all his Berlin Pélleas et Mélisande, which strips away the opera’s decadent symbolism to reveal the suffocating cruelty at the heart of a dysfunctional marriage. In Kosky’s world, Shostakovich’s Katerina is Mélisande’s more cynical cousin; brutalized and brutal, she is capable of a viciousness Debussy’s heroine is never afforded.

Lady Macbeth is a stage work that almost always works: Graham Vick at the Met, Richard Jones for Covent Garden, Warlikowski in Paris, Kusej in Amsterdam all devastate and overwhelm in their own way. Even a late-career Kristine Opolais, yowling her way through Shostakovich’s score in bare feet, was a somehow compelling experience. But Kosky eschews the lurid and goes for a sharp austerity, and in doing so achieves something far scarier and far more shocking.

Photo by Monika Rittershaus

The unit set features nothing more than a few tables, chairs, and a bed in front of a wall of stifling concrete. It’s Kosky after all, so things are never too drab. The twitchy choreography of the policemen brings a moment of absurdity that casts the impending brutality in ever greater relief, and it’s a clever idea to move the interval to after the drunken peasant discovers Zinoviy’s body. It allows for the first half to end with one of the opera’s most raucous orchestral interludes, showing off conductor James Gaffigan and his orchestra on blistering form — good thing his contract has just been renewed for another three years while he takes on Houston Grand Opera. Tenor Caspar Krieger elicits belly laughs as the drunken peasant, hopping around the stage with his pants around his ankles, humping Zinoviy’s corpse, and excitedly throwing flour around the stage. It’s shocking, surreal, and very, very funny.

It’s this detailed characterization that brings the production to life, from the drunken malice of Krieger’s peasant to the way Mirka Wagner’s Aksinya gleefully spits on Sergei’s whipped body after he rapes her. Dimitry Ivashchenko’s sonorous bass is luxury casting as the priest and Susan Zarrabi is an appropriately malicious Sonyetka, spitting out the text and letting out some blood-curdling screams as Katerina strangles her with her stockings. The Komische Oper’s chorus, too, is on excellent form, with enough musical discipline to cleanly execute the choral fugue in the wedding scene. Kosky always draws effective choral stage images, whether in the frantic desperation of the prisoners in Siberia or the back-and-forth drudgery of the laborers against which Katerina notices Sergei.

Photo by Monika Rittershaus

It’s easy to see why Katerina notices him when the costume designer Victoria Behr and lighting designer Olaf Freese frame Sean Pannikar’s biceps so lovingly. He’s certainly tall and handsome enough for the role of Sergei, though it pushes his elegant lyric tenor to its very limits. He’s a magnificent actor though, simmering with insecurity and violence beneath his swaggering exterior. As Zinoviy, Elmar Gilbertsson’s slim, compact tenor often pales next to Dmitry Ulyanov’s Boris, whose booming sound and imposing presence is impressive.

But it was Ambur Braid’s show, and her ferocious Katerina may very well be the thing that catapults her into stardom. It’s hard to believe that it’s been just over a decade since I heard the Canadian soprano sing the Queen of the Night, Semele, and a Fledermaus’ Adele, and there’s definitely something of the Anja Silja about her in her vocal and dramatic fearlessness. It’s a joy to hear the role sung by someone in their vocal prime — I’ve heard too many a soprano scoop her way through Boris’ lament — and Braid soprano’s has ample power from a piercing upper register down to a zesty chest voice as well as excellent intonation and clean vocal attacks. She’s also a phenomenal actor, fearlessly contorting her body and face to express Katerina’s frustration, clinginess, and cruelty. The stillness she achieves in the final scene is terrifying, with a psychopathic glint in her eye before she explodes in violence with such ferocity that the woman beside me screamed. That’s the exact response this opera deserves.

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