The People are angry. In fact, they’re bloody furious. As the lights flash up on David Pountney’s production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace, the entire cast confronts the audience: grim, braced, defiant. And before you’ve had time to wonder if this sort of thing is just the long-term legacy of Les Misérables, or whether opera directors really are in love with totalitarian imagery, they unleash hell. This is the chorus of Welsh National Opera, after all. You just know they’re going to slay, and they do. The massive, world-historical Epigraph to Act One shakes the walls and your place is no longer to question, but to sit there and be overawed.
To be fair, a Soviet composer during the second world war could hardly get away with anything less. It’s clear that Prokofiev originally envisaged something like Mussorgsky and Borodin’s historical epics, in which tub-thumping grandeur is undercut by a mixture of intimacy and mocking, satirical humour.
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