This is self-recommending, if for no other reason than it’s the only recording of this work available. Katerina Ismailova is the revised version of the composer’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which he was obliged to withdraw after Stalin attended a performance (January 26, 1936) and left in the middle. Two days later, an unsigned article in the Party newspaper Pravda made it clear that the composer’s “game of clever ingenuity may end very badly,” and referred to the music as “fidgeting” and “screaming” while it “tickles the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences.” The opera was banned. Shostakovich removed some controversial passages (an orchestral depiction of a sexual climax, et al.) and subdued others. Katerina is still a pretty great, nasty work, and it is as much worth hearing as Lady Macbeth.
This performance, an RAI broadcast from Rome on May 29, 1976, in vivid stereo with just the occasional distortion from high voices, is moody, precise, and right-on-the-money. Only one cast member seems to be Russian (though the conductor is), and as a result there are some discrepancies in pronunciation–but it doesn’t really matter. Gloria Lane’s Katerina is just the right mixture of bored and dangerous, and she has all the notes (even if the highest ones are un-lovely). I wonder if she made a specialty of the role–she sounds entirely at home in it. William Cochran’s Sergey is big-voiced, unsubtle, and (again) unbeautiful, but he’s also colorful, ardent, and convincing. Finnish bass Kari Nurmela is a wonderfully victimizing/victimized Boris, and the rest of the large cast, most of whom have small parts, have learned them well.
The conductor, Yuri Ahronovich, a Soviet dissident who died in 2002, was principal conductor of the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. He has a great sense for this wry, sometimes very hard-nosed score and effectively captures the humor required for the wacky cops’ chorus in the third act. The sometimes amazingly woodwind-heavy score is played brightly and with a sense of occasion by the Italian orchestra; they’re not afraid of the purely orchestral moments, such as the interlude in Act 2, with its dissonances and pervasive gloom, or the third-act fugue. Why not own this even if you have a recording of Lady Macbeth? The price is right, and the performance is excellent. Unfortunately, there’s no libretto–only a synopsis is supplied.
