City of dreams

Die tote Stadt
Royal Opera House

The Queen of Spades
Barbican

By sheer chance, three nights later we were given the opportunity to witness a supreme performance of perhaps the greatest of all operas of obsession: Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades at the Barbican, put on by the tireless Mariinsky Theatre during their brief, intense residency. The comparison with Korngold is cruel: with masterly economy Tchaikovsky presents a group of driven characters, with the tormented Herman transferring half his passion for Liza into one for winning, which leads him to terrify the Countess, a stupendous study in aged life-loathing, to death; while Liza, realising she has lost him, kills herself. Every scene-setting stroke of this magnificent score contributes to the manic action, and the Mariinsky could hardly have given a more inspired concert performance.

Indeed, I can’t imagine any performance whatever achieving more than the tension of the scene between Larissa Diadkova’s Countess and Vladimir Galouzine’s Herman. Diadkova is one of the most compelling presences on the operatic stage, and demonstrated that she needs no props, nothing more than the intensity generated by Valery Gergiev at his greatest. The sole weakness was Natalia Timchenko’s Liza, as committed as everyone else, but with too shallow and monochrome a voice to convey the complexity of this moving character; but it was not a seriously damaging shortcoming. It’s a long time since I have staggered out of a theatre so shattered by any operatic work, and with so enhanced an awareness of its greatness.