Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk / Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, Gedda, London Philharmonic
by Petr Weigl

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DVD Reviews of Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk / Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, Gedda, London Philharmonic

DVD Review: Tacky
Summary: 2 Stars

It's so tacky and has such a cheesy video-look that it makes the sound recording seem mediocre, where taken on its own, it's brilliant. Shostakovich's opera includes some violence and sex which does appear on stage in live performances. In this film it looks like some sort of pseudo-artsy and highly unbelievable soft porn flick. To give an example, the fat woman who gets raped (they show it with dim warm lighting) acts like she is being tickled with a feather, which is not the idea that the score portrays. There are also a lot of very '90's looking men with really the sort of buffed symetrical appearance you get from working in a gym, and not the rugged look you'd have among people who perform manual labour all day. Or in the bedroom scene with Katerina and Sergei - their textbook writhings allow embarrasing glimpses at the one part of Sergei which should (judging by Hrubesova's movement) be most 'involved', but which we clearly see in an entirely different condition and nowhere near where it would have to be to cause the effect she is displaying. You can also see a little piece of cloth between them sometimes, when clearly nothing of that sort is meant to be there. Fair enough, the cloth is there even if you don't see it, but the fact that all this is shown makes their 'beast with two backs' act seem ridiculous and insulting. It's actually a matter of bad editing (and bad taste). It doesn't add up, and even absent-mindedly making little mental notes of these inconsistencies is a somewhat unpleasant experience, again, especially because what the music itself conveys is so clearly real.

As another viewer with me said, 'if they're going to be so literal in showing them at it, they should at least have edited out the bit of cloth between them'. This paradox of it being too literal and too fake at once applies not just to the sex scenes, but to the whole film in general. It's rather insulting really in how fake it is. The film as a whole is just so cheap and lacks the tight and oppressive atmosphere of the score.

The CD of the complete opera is available from amazon.com and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Vishnevskaya is miraculous, and the conducting by her husband Rostropovich (both personal friends of the composer) is inspired. Rostropovich and Shostakovich studied composition together, and although not all of Rostropovich's recordings of Shostakovich are first rate, this is the definitive (and most alive) rendition. It probably always will be. Buy the CD, and pass up on the DVD.

Description of Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk / Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, Gedda, London Philharmonic

Musically, this Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is not likely to be surpassed in the foreseeable future. It is not true, as the back cover says, that Shostakovich wrote the title role for Galina Vishnevskaya; she was not quite 10 years old when it was written. But she and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich became close friends of Shostakovich, and their recording, with a carefully picked cast, is a basic document on how this opera should sound. With the enormous capacity of DVD, it should have been possible to include the whole sound recording on a separate track. But what has been included is powerful. --Joe McLellan

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