This week, Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. 1. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Metropolitan Opera The Met had a rough year: the threat of a strike, conflict over the allegedly terrorist-loving The Death of Klinghoffer, and a nauseating deficit ($22 million!). But once the curtain goes up, such trivial problems fade in favor of much worse ones, like those playing out in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In Graham Vick’s long-absent vintage production, the soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek made killing your husband, banging his employee, poisoning his father, and going on a death march to Siberia into a hugely entertaining evening.2. St. Matthew Passion, Peter Sellars and the Berlin Philharmonic Sellars reconfigured both the Park Avenue Armory and Bach’s oratorio, performing the piece in the round and bringing out the intimate human currents in a monumental, scriptural score. Led by Simon Rattle, it was also terrific theater. 3. Salome,...
- 12/11/2014
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
Does the Metropolitan Opera not know when it has a winner? Graham Vick’s 1994 production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, one of the 20th century’s greatest operas, has spent the past 20 years in mothballs, except for a brief airing-out in 2000. Now it’s finally rocketed out of storage in a phosphorescent burst. And yet with an infectious apathy usually reserved for duds, the company has allotted only five more performances and omitted the opera from the HD broadcast season. The message from the Met is clear: You can skip this one. Well, you shouldn't.Defying all who have been misled into thinking that opera is a delicate or decorous genre, Shostakovich wrote a work that revels in raunchy vulgarity. Stalin loathed it for exactly that reason, but we’re tougher than he was. We can delight in this scorching, sweaty, and brutally entertaining show. It also contains two elegantly composed murders,...
- 11/12/2014
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
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