It's no overstatement to call Shostakovich's opera The Nose an oddity. With its bizarre plot taken from an absurdist and deeply satirical short story by Gogol, its brief running time (less than two hours), and politically provocative nature, this 1930 work has never really found a home in the repertory. However, a new production at the Metropolitan Opera this March that is in equal parts bracing and exhilarating more than makes a case for The Nose, and particularly in this brilliant staging.
The story of the opera is this: one morning, a minor bureaucrat ("collegiate assessor") in St. Petersburg named Kovalyov wakes up to discover that his nose has been sliced off by a drunken barber the day before. The Nose, now the size of a person, has staged something of its own little coup, and set itself up as an entity of higher official ranking than Kovalyov. We see The Nose bustling about the city: going to the cathedral for prayer, riding a horse, going for a swim (taking a literal "nose dive"), playing piano, and plotting a trip to flee town altogether, ostensibly to rid itself of its tiresome and utilitarian past, while poor Kovalyov--a self-important little man at the opera's opening--evinces more and more sympathy as he tries to negotiate his way through the city to reclaim his runaway proboscis.
 | The director for this production is the South African artist William Kentridge, who also co-designed the set and created the fantastic video projections. Kentridge is the first visual artist whom the Metropolitan's general manager, Peter Gelb, has solicited to direct at the opera house; concurrent to The Nose's run uptown, the Museum of Modern Art is staging a three-decade retrospective of Kentridge's work, which is on display through May 17. |
Having Kentridge to the Met is a truly inspired pairing between artist and artwork: the director and his team, whose numbers include the set designer Sabine Theunissen, pack the entire proscenium top to bottom with video projections that include more visual jokes, Soviet political slogans, emphatic asides, and underscoring commentary, often given in Russian and only occasionally in English, than can be devoured in real time. (A fluent reader of Russian would undoubtedly have even more fun with this visual feast.)
Kentridge places the action somewhere around the time that Shostakovich wrote The Nose, when Stalin's rise was still fresh, collectivized agriculture was first being implemented, and the Gulag was being established. The color palette and graphic edginess--all blocky and geometric tans, blacks, greys, and of course bright red--instantly evoke the Soviet Constructivist art of the 1920s and 1930s made by Gustav Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, and others.
These collaged elements are combined with archival film footage that includes even some of Shostakovich himself playing the piano, though, through artful video editing, even the composer's own face has been obfuscated by the big, black reality of The Nose. (The same treatment is showered upon a loop of an Anna Pavlova ballet solo.) Quite regrettably, the Met did not schedule The Nose in its HD broadcast season; that's a real shame, considering that this is one of the smartest, bitingly wittiest, and most fun performances seen in years, and one in which the visuals are absolutely integral to the audience experience.
Valery Gergiev is now one of the most regularly seen conductors in New York (and is about to start a three-week Stravinsky festival with the New York Philharmonic that begins April 21st). Gergiev, who has become a great champion of this score at home in Russia, clearly adores this music; he was able to elicit tremendous color and punch from the Met orchestra without ever reverting to stridency, a regrettably easy trap for a Shostakovich conductor to fall into. The Nose is an amazing score, written when the composer was a mere twenty-two years old. (The work was premiered in Leningrad in 1930, and was not performed again in the Soviet Union until 1974, the year before Shostakovich's death.)
It is the brash work of an ebullient and confident young composer writing for rumbling brass and sharp-angled woodwinds and strings in blazes of unusual color. Within the same piece, however, Shostakovich also deftly evokes old Russian choral music in the cathedral scene without getting mired in mawkish sentimentality or in the traditionally heavy, Russian style of four-part harmony.
In an evening full of sparkling singing (particularly from Andrei Popov, giving his Met debut as the Police Inspector), perhaps no one else quite reaches the heights of Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot, who up until now has been best known in New York for his Tony Award-winning performance across the plaza as Emile de Becque in Lincoln Center Theater's "South Pacific." Presumably, either the decidedly knotty music or the Russian language might some stop other singers right in their tracks; Szot, however, easily scrambles over any perceived limitations, delivering an idiomatic and organically realized performance that is just as much about acting as it is about singing. We first spy Szot onstage in spasmic throes, tossing and turning in a bed whose frame seems too small to contain him comfortably; instantly, and just from his body language alone, we know that Kovalyov is having a nightmare of a day even before he realizes the loss of his olfactory organ and suffers all the small and large humiliations of the super-stratified society in which he lives.
But his singing, too, is strong; Szot cuts through the other 30 vocalists (singing 80 solo roles) in this opera with great clarity and a beautifully open sound. Singing the very small but abundantly important role of The Nose, who otherwise prances about the stage smugly in a human-sized papier-mache costume, was the tenor Gordon Gietz, who had much more difficulty projecting past all the commotion onstage on opening night.
The New York run of The Nose is a co-production between the Metropolitan Opera and two French entities, the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and the Opera National de Lyon. Its' worth noting that the festival in Provence was also a co-producer (along with the Holland Festival Amsterdam and La Scala) of the also fully successful, and equally intellectually minded, production that the Met did with the Wiener Festwochen of Janacek's From the House of the Dead that stunned New York audiences earlier this season. May such future collaborations prosper and be just as fruitful as what we've been treated to this year.
Browse more editorial features here
by Anastasia Tsioulcas
