Having been away, I only got to Alexander Raskatov’s opera A Dog’s Heart at its fifth performance by ENO, by which time everyone knew that it was brilliantly mounted, but not of much musical substance.
Having been away, I only got to Alexander Raskatov’s opera A Dog’s Heart at its fifth performance by ENO, by which time everyone knew that it was brilliantly mounted, but not of much musical substance. Actually, you could say the same for most of the new operas that ENO has mounted over the past decade, and from composers much better known than Raskatov. I’d be happy to volunteer a list.
For me a good deal of the unsatisfactoriness of A Dog’s Heart lies with Bulgakov’s novel, which is a scattershot satire on Soviet life, in particular on the social and genetic engineering which the early rulers of Soviet Russia hoped would lead to a happier society — hence the attempt in the novel and opera to graft a man’s testicles and pituitary gland on to a dog.
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