Shostakovich’s First Symphony and his first opera, The Nose, point in the modernist direction his later music might have taken, had he not so spectacularly fallen foul of the Soviet regime. But the talent so brilliantly announced in the symphony always seems less controlled and focused in The Nose. Gogol’s surreal, sardonic short story about the bureaucrat Kovalov and his increasingly desperate efforts to be reunited with his errant organ may have been a perfect match to Shostakovich’s precocious brilliance, but the breathless energy in the score – with its manic gallops and insidious ostinatos, winding chorales and dissonant outbursts – sometimes betrays a composer in his early 20s trying a bit too hard to make his name.
Perhaps that relentlessness has made The Nose such a rarity – Barrie Kosky’s production is the Royal Opera’s first. At times his mostly brilliant staging – with designs by Klaus Grünberg and costumes by Buki Shiff – also tries too hard. The genuinely imaginative attempts to impose some kind of shape on the dramatic structure seem to come from desperation more than artistic necessity.
Portrayed with a wonderful mix of pomposity and self-pity by Martin Winkler, Kovalov is given a bright red clown’s nose, while his own nose goes on the rampage in St Petersburg in giant form, propelled around the stage on the legs of a boy, Ilan Galkoff. In one interlude it’s worshipped at a black mass by male dancers in basques and fishnets; in another it leads a chorus line of similarly oversized noses in a tap-dance routine. Like so much in the show both episodes are brilliantly conceived, but irrelevant. Even if Shostakovich’s opera has a heart, or a sharp satirical point to make, what Kosky does so virtuosically really doesn’t identify them.
Ingo Metzmacher conducts the score with brittle brilliance, every orchestral effect raspingly precise. Sung in David Pountney’s new English version, the performances are all sharply conceived with many multiple roles. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as Kovalov’s obsequious servant and John Tomlinson as the barber Iakovlevitch, who starts the whole farce, deserve special mentions.
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