Word: ismailova
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...dromedary-branded cigarettes and filling stations with Pegasus insignias effectively evoke 1950s America. And the uninhibited, vocally exemplary performance of the title role by soprano Lisa Gustafsson, 25, partly redeems the evening. She becomes the much younger, equally alluring sister of such operatic sirens as Carmen, Lulu and Katerina Ismailova. If only, like them, she had something to sing...
...most important operatic composer of the century. Then, in 1936, the Soviet authorities denounced the popular Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as "muddle instead of music." Afraid not only for his livelihood but for his life, Shostakovich withdrew the earthy score, replaced it with a pallid adaptation called Katerina Ismailova, and never wrote another opera. It was not until 1979 that the original work surfaced; gradually, it has been replacing its successor in the international repertoire...
...second and last opera - his first was the bitingly satirical The Nose (1928), based on a story by Gogol - has had a checkered history. Completed in 1932, hailed as a major achievement at its premiere in 1934, condemned by Stalin in 1936 and sanitized 20 years later as Katerina Ismailova, the opera electrified its first audiences in both Russia and the West with its sexual frankness. One early critic, referring to the lascivious trombone slides that accompany the furious lovemaking of Katerina and Sergei in Act I, called the music "pornophony." But the opera proved popular, with 83 performances...
...write. But as a rule, first impulses tend to be more vital and visceral: Hindemith's first version of Cardillac, for example, or Verdi's original Don Carlos. The same is true of Lady Macbeth. As staged by the enterprising San Francisco Opera, which gave Katerina Ismailova its U.S. premiere in 1964, Lady Macbeth showed a power and raw urgency that was weakened by its later revision...
Curiously, the rough edges, inevitable in a piece by so young a composer, give the work more impact. Lady Macbeth is an opera of sexual obsession; Katerina Ismailova, by comparison, is merely about crime and punishment. The restoration of the third act of Lulu two years ago ensured that the truncated version-which was the way the opera was presented until 1979-would not be heard again. So now will Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk become the standard version of Shostakovich's masterpiece, and Katerina will fade into obscurity, an object for musicological study, not for performance. There...