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The Nose
by Dmitri Shostakovich
Opera Boston
Cutler Majestic Theatre
Tickets and more information.
Every review of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose is obligated to contain at least one nose joke, so we’ll get ours out of the way now: The spirited Opera Boston production at the Cutler Majestic Theatre makes the case for this rarely performed modernist masterpiece to enjoy a higher profile—get it?—in the repertoire.
Based on the famous nineteenth-century tale by Gogol in which a civil servant, Kovalyov, loses his nose only to find it running about St. Petersburg in the uniform of a higher-ranking official, the opera’s helter-skelter montage of musical styles and its sublimely absurd satire of bureaucracy were more than enough to get it suppressed by the Soviet authorities after a short run in 1930.
Stephen Salters is both charismatic and sympathetic as Kovalyov, and with his warm baritone at the center Opera Boston steers this production away from satire’s sharpest edges in the direction of pathos. Less vain and rank-obsessed than other performers might interpret him, Salters’s Kovalyov is a kind of Everyman, caught in world turned infernally—and ridiculously—upside-down.
Alexander Lisyansky’s set design - with its evocations of St. Petersburg’s dark labyrinth of arcades and alleyways, courtyards and canals - underlines Kovalyov’s confusion about whether his dilemma is reality or nightmare. Over the proceedings hangs a fierce double-headed eagle, emblem of the Tsars, gripping in its claws a gigantic nose.
Across this terrain choreographer Martha Mason and director Julia Pevzner deploy a large cast in visually-striking arrangements, expressive alternately of big-city alienation, bureaucratic conformity, and peasant earthiness.
No one brings out this latter aspect more robustly than Vladimir Matorin - on loan from the Bolshoi Opera - in his role as the suspect barber Ivan Yakovlevitch.
But Torrance Blaisdell has the production’s greatest challenge, singing from inside the full-body nose costume ingeniously designed by Nancy Leary. His high tenor is a fittingly nasal whine.
In an opera regrettably short of female voices, the glittering epistolary quartet between Kovalyov and his crony Yaryzhkin (Matthew DiBattista) on the stage and the Lady Podtochina and her daughter (Victoria Avetisyan and Yelena Dudochkin) in the first balcony is a welcome change of pace.
The pace changes often in the score’s catalogue of musical styles, however, and Gil Rose crisply conducts the orchestra through the switchbacks of Alban Berg-style atonality, Stravinsky-esque dissonance, the melodrama of silent-movie accompaniment, and the strains of Slavic folk music.
It’s well worth trying to make the last remaining performance on March 3. Tickets begin at $29.00.
In Russian with English supertitles.
Reviewed by Edmond Caldwell. Photo of Stephen Salters as Kovalyov and Torrance Blaisdell as the Nose. Photo credit Clive Grainger.
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Nice review. You brought back to mind many of the aspects of the opera I enjoyed while watching it.