Wow, this is good: Grange Park Opera’s Ivan the Terrible reviewed

There are worse inconveniences than having to wear a face mask to the opera. But there’s one consequence that hadn’t really struck home until an hour into Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ivan the Terrible. The citizens of Pskov are massing in the streets. The Tsar’s army is approaching, and Rimsky is building one of those surging Russian crowd scenes: bass-heavy chorus blazing away while ominous bell sounds — basses, horns and rasping gong — shake the orchestra to its bones. Suddenly a bloodstained figure staggers in and collapses; a refugee from nearby Novgorod. ‘Your brother-city sends its greetings, and asks you to arrange its funeral,’ he gasps. At that point, I’d have given quite a lot to have been able to lean over to my companion and silently mouth just four words — wow, this is good.

Cards on the table: I’m more likely to shed tears at Don Carlos than La traviata, and I fidget impatiently through the Falstaff bits in Henry IV. Enough with the smiley-weepie stuff, let’s get back to the power-politics! Russian opera gets a bad rap in the West precisely because of its association with national history and myth, and Ivan the Terrible hasn’t had many outings in the UK since Diaghilev last presented it in London in 1914. Like Borodin’s Prince Igor and Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, it exists in a tangle of different editions and configurations, less a fully achieved masterpiece than a kit of parts for one. The problem being that those disjointed components contain some truly soul-shaking music.

David Pountney has seized that problem by the scruff. He’s added Rimsky’s standalone prologue Boyarin Vera Sheloga, making this effectively a double bill, and extending the first half to nearly two hours.