In recent years, the Met has closed its doors for a month toward the end of January sparking mid-winter blues among opera lovers. Last week Carnegie and Geffen Halls stepped up with the perfect antidote: an unusually interesting trio of sopranos encompassing Kristine Opolais, Golda Schultz and Lise Davidsen.

When out-of-town orchestras visit New York, they generally strive to present programs showing them at their best. Occasionally their evenings feature an opera in concert, sometimes a one-act work like Strauss’s Salome or Elektra or just a “bleeding chunk,” as the Boston Symphony Orchestra did in 2018 when it performed the second act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—Jonas Kaufmann’s first attempt at Tristan.

The opera featured during this year’s BSO visit to Carnegie Hall, however, was extraordinarily ambitious: Shostakovich’s 1934 four-act masterpiece Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It was the latest chapter of the orchestra’s acclaimed cycle (led by Music Director Andris Nelsons), which has presented and recorded for Deutsche Grammophon all the composer’s symphonies and concertos. Lady Macbeth, derived from Nikolai Leskov’s infamous novella, revolves around Katarina, the wife of a provincial merchant who murders both her husband and father-in-law to escape her unhappy life. The husband’s body is discovered just before Katarina and her lover Sergei are to marry. On their way to prison in Siberia, Katarina discovers that Sergei has a new love whom she pushes into the Volga River. Then desperate Katarina jumps in after her, and both women perish under the waves.

For this tawdry tale, Shostakovich co-wrote the libretto with Alexander Preis and composed a towering score of biting, breathless intensity that features twenty-three singing roles and an enormous orchestra. The Boston instrumentalists who played in New York with virtuosic brilliance more than filled the Carnegie stage—eight brass players were situated on the auditorium floor to the right-front side of the audience.

When presenting an opera in concert, some organizations like Teatro Nuovo require the principal singers to memorize their parts and interact as if they were performing in an opera house with sets and costumes. Others (see: the English Concert’s recent Rodelinda) permit the principals to have their scores atop music stands while they engage in some discreet interaction.

But Boston’s Lady........

© Observer