San Francisco Classical Voice

The opera is the story of one much-abused woman among many brutish men — "the ray of light in a dark kingdom," as Shostakovich, in his essay on the opera, pointedly paraphrases the Russian literary critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov (who was writing about a different Katerina, the Kat'a Kabanova of Alexander Ostrovsky's 1859 play The Storm and, later, of Janácek's opera). Certainly the production does all it can to present her so. In a world of drab colors, she wears a fuchsia robe and shawl; when she strips this off, beneath is a pure-white nightdress. Even in the grim last act, it is she who has the bright-red stockings amid a score of gray-clad convicts, and it's only when her erstwhile lover Sergei tricks her out of the stockings as a gift for his new fling, Sonyetka, that Katerina snaps and commits her third and last murder.

Solveig Kringelborn, as Katerina, caught the strange not-quite-innocence of Shostakovich's disturbing heroine with uncanny realism. Her naïve boredom in the first scene and her naïve passion for her new lover were of a piece. Her Katerina was a woman so vulnerable to emotional impulse that her crimes seemed natural — not as in "I see how a deranged woman might have done that," but as in "well, anyone would have done that."

The music helped, naturally. Katerina's music is marvelous, full of yearning, full of life. If Shostakovich ever wrote anything again as tender as the love music in Scene V, I don't know where it is. And Katerina's passionate appeal to Sergei early in the last act must have meant something particular to the composer, given that he worked it in to the fourth movement of his Eighth Quartet, that goulash of favorite self-quotations. Kringelborn's distress and her love and her despair were all real; and when she demanded that her lover kiss her just after dumping her dead husband in the cellar, I for one thought that that's exactly what Katerina would do. (Not so a lot of the audience, I'm afraid; I was surrounded by chortles.)

The production aided the score, sometimes in surprising ways. No passage in Lady Macbeth is better known — by reputation, anyway — than the first sexual encounter between Katerina and her newfound lover Sergei (Christopher Ventris), the passage with the detumescing trombone glissandos that led a critic during the opera's first American performances to coin the word "pornophony." In some accounts this is a rape scene; in the Opera program's synopsis, Katerina and Sergei "spend the night together," which is awfully coy but (in view of subsequent events) probably nearer the truth.

But the master-stroke of this production is that the anticipated wild Stuttgartian sex scene doesn't happen at all. Katerina and Sergei embrace, standing, motionless, while Shostakovich's surplus brass march onstage, in absurd blue and gold uniforms, and play right through to the famous glissandos. Only then does Sergei fall back onto the bed. When we first see the lovers in bed together, it's two scenes later, and the melting physical tenderness on the stage and the tenderness in the music seem a single thing, as far removed from that last stark tableau of conquest as possible.

Kringelborn's eloquent and powerful voice had no female rivals save the brief appearances of Ann Panagulias (as Aksinya, a servant tormented by a gang of men, led by Sergei, early in the plot) and Jane Dutton (as Sonyetka, Sergei's saucy new lover and Katerina's last victim before her own suicide). Otherwise it's all men, predominantly basso and all thoroughly nasty.

The main tenors are Katerina's husband and her lover. Vsevolod Grivnov sang Zinovy Borisovich, the husband; his rather tense tenor contrasted well with Ventris' freer, more open sound as the amorous Sergei. (Howard Haskin took the third substantial tenor role, that of the "shabby peasant" who breaks into Katerina's wine cellar in search of booze and stumbles on her husband's corpse. His singing was as deft as his footwork, which given what he was made to do is saying something.)

Then the basses: Boris Timofeyevich, father of Zinovy — and first victim (Vladimir Vaneev); the Priest (Kevin Glavin); the Police Sergeant (Nikita Storojev); the Old Convict (Mark Coles). Only the last has what you might call a sympathetic part, but all were splendid, Vaneev's petty, lecherous, doomed Boris almost managing to rouse pity. Surrounding them from time to time were the Opera Chorus, as peasants, rogues, policemen, convicts — singing brilliantly and acting with considerable panache. The men who learned to do that peculiar Russian high-kneed trot (while retaining enough breath to sing right afterwards) deserve particular praise.

As for the orchestra, it's not practical to single anyone out for particular praise; everything was magnificent. The score is heavy on the low winds and the brass, which grunt along with the more bestial male characters and break into trite dance-hall ditties at the slightest provocation; but the string parts are terribly demanding and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful (the fugato opening the wedding scene is an astonishing thing, for one). And the orchestral interludes connecting the scenes, which contain much of the score's richest music, were powerful and eloquent under Donald Runnicles' direction.

Lady Macbeth is reprised 11/11, 14, 17, 20, and 22.