Perhaps it’s surprising that Birmingham Opera Company hasn’t tackled Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk before. This is the 50th production Graham Vick’s unconventional company has put on, if you also count its earlier incarnation as City of Birmingham Touring Opera, and Shostakovich’s opera – a bleak and brilliant satire, buried in 1936 by Stalin, who suspected he was being sent up – and it fits the group’s brief perfectly. There are roles for the customary army of volunteer extras and a huge amateur chorus, recruited from all corners of the city: meaty, grotesque roles that they can have fun with, and they frequently do. They are rats, factory workers, bent policemen, drunk wedding guests and, finally, fellow prisoners. When they sing the convicts’ chorus in the final scene the sound is as thrilling as it would be with any professional chorus.
This time the building BOC has taken over is the Tower Ballroom, a low-ceilinged hangar in Edgbaston that has seen better days; once a popular party venue, now an occasional nightclub. It’s just the place to set the scene for this quasi-immersive production: here we all are, guests at a tacky wedding reception that’s heading south. As ever, the audience stands and watches as the action happens all around – and if the performance lets you forget this is a long opera, your feet won’t. The extra brass band that Shostakovich brings on stage to play, po-faced, at the tensest or most ridiculous moments, pops up behind the bar, or shuffles in behind a funeral procession, or is revealed behind a plastic curtain wearing bloodstained wedding dresses.
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra are on the largest platform, their playing perfectly judged regarding balance with the voices. In front of them, conductor Alpesh Chauhan – an impressive poster-boy for Birmingham’s state music education service – does an excellent job, invigorating the score and holding his widely spaced forces together via TV screens.
It helps that the text – in a direct English translation based on David Pountney’s for ENO, but extra sweary – is put across so clearly by the professional principal cast. Chrystal E Williams lights up the room as the gloriously murderous Katerina. It’s a nice touch that Block 9’s eclectic costume designs have her initially dressed in West African-style fabrics with gaudy prints of fungus and rodents – her first victim, her father-in-law, will be seen off in the kitchen with rat poison in his mushroom stew. Later, alone in her wedding dress on the ballroom floor, she holds the audience rapt with her aria of broken-hearted disillusionment. Stripped down from dirty work overalls to tiger-print velour briefs and socks, Brenden Gunnell may not look like the “right proper man-whore” who has been raising the pulses of the boss’s wives wherever he works, but we’re not supposed to think all Katerina’s choices are good ones, and he sings Sergey powerfully, in a ringing and untiring tenor. Brutal Boris, the father-in-law, gets a strong performance from Eric Greene, who lends the old lecher more than the usual charm.
The enthusiastic, unwearied chorus, the quasi-immersive promenade format: these are familiar elements now, used by Vick in his work in opera houses worldwide, and yet time has barely blunted their impact. BOC’s work remains as sharp and urgent as ever – a power surge feeding into opera’s electricity supply.
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