Brutalising Russia

I caught up with Welsh National Opera’s production of Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina only in Birmingham, the last performance of its first run. I hope it’s revived soon, since an account of it as intense as the one I saw, without longueurs, is just what this work needs to lift it from the status of masterpiece-but-also-bore to simply that of masterpiece. It is done in Shostakovich’s orchestration, and with Stravinsky’s setting of the final chorus for the Old Believers (or call them Fundamentalists to get them in perspective). With David Pountney as director, one expects the action to be updated, and the sets, variants on a single collection of intimidating props, suggest 1920s architecture and painting. I suppose we must concede to Pountney that, if he wholly lacks an historical sense, which all his work suggests that he does, it’s better that he should present his understanding of a work as set in a recent period which he can grasp.