Boris Godunov, review — La Scala season opens with controversy and towering singing

Offstage drama had preceded the onstage spectacle of the opening night of La Scala’s season, with climate change protesters splattering the theatre’s facade with paint on the morning of the show and workers’ strikes against funding cuts derailing a November rehearsal. But it was Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov that dominated headlines last month, when the Ukrainian consul in Milan demanded that La Scala cancel its production, just as Polish National Opera had done in March, as a public indictment of Vladimir Putin’s war.

La Scala resisted, highlighting that it had chosen the title years before the war, and that it had shown solidarity with Ukraine in other ways (not least by dismissing conductor and Putin ally Valery Gergiev from a Milan production shortly after the invasion). It would have been plausible for the opera house to draw parallels from the Pushkin-inspired libretto about a 16th-century regicide ruling over the hungry, discontented Russian people. La Scala dodged politics instead, arguing that art transcends current affairs.

But it was ultimately difficult to banish contemporary associations from the mind. Director Kasper Holten evokes the full might of imperial power, climaxing in a magnificent coronation scene populated by dignitaries in shimmering golden garb (period costumes by Ida Marie Ellekilde). Brawling police officers and staggering drunkards suggest a lawless Russia on the verge of collapse. The added silent role of the regent’s bloodied corpse, played by a child actor, means the tsar’s brutality hangs over this production.

Pimen’s written account of Boris’s misdemeanours seem to dictate events, with an illuminated curved backdrop resembling torn sheets of paper and maps forming the cocoon-like space within which the action unfolds. Passages are ripped from the hermit’s scroll, a potentially interesting allusion to the manipulation of memory and future events. Yet the idea never feels fully explored; this was, overall, a relatively straightforward reading, presumably for the benefit of the 1.5mn people who watched on live national TV.

Conducting the first non-Italian opening night opera in eight years, Riccardo Chailly delivered a brooding, aching and often ethereal account of music invested with the anguish of an entire nation. What was lacking was the feral intensity Gergiev has brought to Russian repertoire at this house, reminding us of the necessary price global culture has paid for the war in Ukraine.

There was excellent stagecraft all round, especially from the mighty Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov in the title role of the (rare) original shorter and starker 1869 version of the score. His was a towering performance of Shakespearean proportions delivered in a jet-black voice, authoritative in the opening scenes and dramatic in his displays of terror and final death scene.

Ain Anger’s dignified hermit Pimen, Dmitry Golovnin’s resolute pretender Grigory and Oleg Budaratskiy’s brutal guard also stood out. Stanislav Trofimov and Alexander Kravets were darkly comical as the drunken vagabond monks Varlaam and Misail, and Maria Barakova was a bawdy innkeeper. La Scala’s first-rate chorus was powerful as the oppressed masses. Dropping Mussorgsky’s Boris would have been a missed opportunity.

★★★☆☆

To December 29, teatroallascala.org