Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk [Limited Edition, Original recording remastered]

Dmitri Shostakovich (Composer), Mstislav Rostropovich (Conductor), Galina Vishnevskaya (Performer), Nicolai Gedda (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Galina Vishnevskaya, Nicolai Gedda
• Conductor: Mstislav Rostropovich
• Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
• Audio CD (April 9, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Limited Edition, Original recording remastered
• Label: EMI Classics
• ASIN: B000063UM3
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,753 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

Disc: 1

1. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Akh, nye spitsa bol she, poprobuyu

2. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: V dyevkakh luchshe bylo

3. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Gribki sevodnya budut?

4. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Prigotov otravu diya krys

5. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Govori!...Plotinu-to na

6. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Proshchay, Katerina

7. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Chevo vstal? Chevo ostanovilsa?

8. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Interlude

9. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Ay! Ay! Ay!

10. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Barynya!...Ay!...Shto s toboyu

See all 25 tracks on this disc

Disc: 2

1. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Sergey, Seryozha!

2. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Katya, prikhodit konyets lyubvi nashey

3. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Nye pechal' sa, Sergey

4. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Opyat usnul

5. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Nu? Chevo tebye?

6. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Slushay, Sergey, Sergey!

7. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Katerina!...Kto tam?

8. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Tepyer shabash

9. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: Shto ty tut shoish?

10. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera, Op. 29: U menya byla kuma

See all 26 tracks on this disc

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stalin Didn't Like It Much!, April 11, 2003

By 

Christopher Forbes "weirdears" (Brooklyn,, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Audio CD)

Fewer works of opera have had such a troubled history and ruinous effect on a composer than Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Anyone familiar with the life of the composer knows the story. Shostakovitch was a brilliant young Leningrad based composer who was deeply involved with the radical intellectual movements of his time, particularly the theatrical work of Mayakovsky. He had scored an early brilliant success with his student project, the Symphony No. 1 and his raucous operatic treatment of Gogol's The Nose. The prospects looked bright and when Lady Macbeth premiered it was wildly successful....until Stalin say it! The next day an article appeared in Pravda entitled :Chaos Instead of Music" and Shostakovitch was officially in disgrace...a state that cause the composer to withdraw his dark and compelling 4th symphony and which didn't really ease until the war years and the success of his Lenigrad Symphony. (And of course was repeated again after the war.) The real shame of this is that Lady Macbeth is arguably one of the greatest modern works of the operatic stage, along with Wozzeck, Peter Grimes, and maybe a few other works by Britten and Janacek.

The plot is primarily what angered Stalin...Lady Macbeth is a rather dark and erotic melodrama, which probably offended the former seminarian's latent puritanical sensibilities. Katerina, the opera's main character, is caught in a dull and lifeless marriage to a petty merchant. When she falls in love with a young worker, she first kills her father in law and then her husband. When discovered by the police, both she and her lover are sent to Siberia, where he abandons Katerina for another woman. Driven mad with jealousy and despair, Katerina pushes the other woman into a river, jumps in after her and both are drowned. The bare bones of the plot do not do justice to the power of the work. No character in the opera is virtuous...the murdered father-in-law secretly lusts after Katerina, the husband is a whimpering whiner, the lover is shallow and a real brute, and Katerina herself is vicious in the extreme. However, Shostakovitch garners real sympathy for Katerina in the marvelous musical depiction of the utter despair and boredom of her life...the almost helplessness of her seduction, and the barbarity of both her father-in-law and her husband. The work can almost be read as a proto-feminist tragedy, except that Shostakovitch still clearly abhors all of this characters' behavior.

It is also not a long stretch to see in the trauma of Katerina a portrait of Stalinist society. Repressed, held back by convention and ultimately crushing boredom (a trait familiar from much Russian literature) Katerina is almost a symbol for the sickness that artists saw eating away Russian society at it's core.

The work moves dizzyingly from tragedy to satire to pathos. Scenes involving the peasants are broadly ribald...almost shockingly so. The scenes of the police station are really a thinly veiled satire on the state of Soviet justice and the petty nature of officialdom. Katerina's mad scene, when her dead father-in-law haunts her has the drama of Mussorgsky. And in the final scene, as the prisoners trudge to Siberia, you know that everyone in the audience must have felt the resonance with the political events of the time. This scene has a depth that goes beyond the story on the stage and is clearly projected in the music. It is as powerful as the end of Janacek's House of the Dead or the Forest Scene in Boris. All of the composer's talent is employed in this work...this is Shostakovitch at his highest and most impressive. It's a work that burns itself into your brain, much like the work of Dostoevsky or Bulgakov.

This performance can only be considered a classic. Recorded by Rostropovitch after the revival of the work in the 70s in it's original form (as opposed to the reworking the opera recieved in the 50s at the hands of the composer....a reworking that cut much of the political bite of the original) The opera stars Rostrapovitch's wife Galina Vishnevskaya as the heroine. Though I am not an unbridled fan of the singer...her slavic "hoot" sometimes gets on my nerves...she is marvelous in this role and a really talented vocal actress. She is by turns, pathetic, bathetic, sarcastic, cruel and finally tragic. Also impressive in the cast is Nicolai Gedda, who looses just a bit of his customary honeyed tone in his turn as the shallow Sergey. Rostropovitch is a conductor I generally don't care for. He is a marvelous cellist, but I've heard too many National Symphony Orchestra concerts where he had no control over balances and let the brass and percussion drowned out everything else. But in Shostakovitch and Prokofiev...(and Britten actually) he is superlative on the whole. This is a great example of that. Rostrapovitch has lived everything in this music and it shows.

This is a must-have CD for any opera fan or any fan of Shostakovitch. And if you count yourself as neither, it is still a powerful artistic statement on the effects of repression on the human soul. Certainly, it stands with the very finest in the Russian operatic tradition.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Modern Masterpiece, January 13, 2003

By 

Rosomax (Boulder, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Audio CD)

Out of all the operas written in 20th century, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" certainly stands out as being the richest in melodies and bravest in expression. It is truly the work of Genius. Shostakovich put all the power of his glorious talent for musical character sketching behind this work. In 1934 Dmitri Dmitrievich was reaching his prime, he was idealistic, and not yet taken through the years of communist punishment. In her autobiography "Galina", the singer explains that at the time the composer was also madly in love with his first wife. As a result, Katerina has some of the most beautiful music he had ever written. The men in the opera, by contrast, have the most brutal, alarming, and dark music. All the music carries shades of folksongs, but it's generous, expansive, and flowing for Katerina, and often syncopated, broken, harsh for the men. You can't help liking "Lady Macbeth" and feeling sorry for her. The opera is recorded with the great cast, but the two shining stars here are the incredible husband and wife team of Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich. Both great admirers, friends, and, in a way, pupils of the composer, exiles at the time of this recording, they put a personal touch to this opera, unmatched on record. The legendary prima donna of Bolshoi, Galina Vishnevskaya is her best here. Her immense voice adapts easily to extraordinary high demands of the role, from tender heartwarming pianissimos to powerful but always clear fff. When it comes to subtleties and vivid characterization, she has no equal. Plus, Katerina is one of her favorite roles, she has starred in the movie "Katerina Izmailova", and no matter how many recordings and productions of this opera you might see, you won't find anything to remotely resemble her performance. The greatest cellist of our time Mstislav Rostropovich proves once again that remarkable instrumentalists can make extraordinary conductors. He revels in passion, beauty, and intricacy of the score, always maintaining cohesiveness in the orchestra and warmth and fullness of sound. The interlude following the death of Boris serves as a great example when rather than the finality if death the listener feels the terror of things to come. In Nicolai Gedda's experienced hands, Sergei comes through just as the composer wanted us to see him - a shallow, weak, cowardly and indulgent man, not worthy of Katerina's love. When in scene five he says, "I wanted to declare you my wife before God" we know: he is lying! Under his reassuring that he is a man of culture and understands what love is, there is only a villager who happened to be at the right place at the right time to offer Katerina a mere substitute for what she wanted a great love to be, only to abandon her when he has nothing more to gain. Bulgarian bass Dimiter Petkov offers a very vivid portrayal of lusty old (but still strong) man, "snohatch". His Mephistophelean laugh and later - his ghostly appearance sang on very low echoing notes make him the ultimate "bad guy." Loved the policemen! What a fantastic picture of "law-and-order" in Russia, still true these days. In recent Opera News there's a photo of this scene with Vladimir Ognovenko and Kirov ensemble in modern Militia uniform! EMI offers very clear and well-balanced sound (which was, probably, extremely difficult to accomplish), but a previous edition had a full-size cover picture of the beautiful Galina Vishnevskaya. I would love to have Cyrillic texts, but the phonetic spelling is done well. An absolutely fantastic set, the best tribute to Shostakovich!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Recording of a Great Performance, September 22, 2002

By 

Timothy Dougal (Madison, Wi United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Audio CD)

First, I must alert readers to more reviews of this recording in its earlier CD incarnation available farther down the list here on Amazon. This 2-disc, 2 1/2 hour set is re-remastered on EMI's new Prism SNS system. To my ears, it's sound is just about perfect. Beyond that, this performance of the opera that changed Shostakovich's life, led by Rostropovich from the podium and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, in the starring role, is intensely charged from beginning to end. As for the opera itself, it is very interesting, something of an expanded version of the sprawling 4th Symphony which followed it, exhibiting a similar athematic abandon, eclecticism of genres (from fugue and passacaglia to circus-like music and austere modernism, for instance), and huge climactic passages. It is both exciting and moving. The title may be a little misleading as to nature of Katerina Ismailova, the leading character. To me she seems to combine elements of Clytemnestra, Manon Lescaut and Emma Bovary, to fatal effect for those in her way. This set great modern operatic experience.