Russian rewards

The Bolshoi Opera’s production of Boris Godunov, which they brought to Covent Garden last week, is in almost all respects in a time warp, though it turned out to be a most agreeable one. For the first time in many years, we were able to hear Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of the opera, which has been so widely execrated for its well-meant efforts to ‘correct’ Mussorgsky’s barbarous harmonies, and to enrich his orchestration, that one would only admit to enjoying it to one’s most confidential musical confessor. There are of course recordings of this allegedly vandalistic act easily available, among them one featuring the great Boris Christoff, who insisted (almost always) on using this version, which certainly provides the singer of the title role with a much bigger ego trip. But all we have seen recently have been either the extremely austere first version (the Mariinsky bought it to the Royal Opera last year) or the fuller but still pretty ascetic second, with more scenes, but still with the suffering Russian people as the centre of the action, rather than the anti-hero Boris (but why does Mussorgsky provide him with such undeniably noble music?).