Mariinsky’s Boris Godunov – a revelation

Anyone who thinks opera singers and orchestral players are overworked should spare a thought for the Mariinsky Opera on its trek round England and Wales this week. After Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery in Cardiff on Sunday, the whole caravan rolled up at the Barbican in the shorter — but not exactly lightweight — first version of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. And by the time you read this it will have added Shchedrin’s The Left-Hander and (in Birmingham) the first two instalments of Wagner’s Ring, plus, for the chorus (not required in The Ring till Sunday’s Götterdämmerung), two concerts of Russian sacred music in London and Cardiff.

The mad genius behind this odyssey is of course the Mariinsky’s musical director Valery Gergiev, who is conducting all the operas and, for all I know, hypnotising the singers into performing under conditions that would give most voice teachers a tic douloureux. Gergiev creates the impression that his hectic itineraries survive on a knife-edge of timing. He was 15 minutes late for the Prokofiev, and by no means prompt with the Musorgsky. Yet there was nothing chancy about the performances. Prokofiev’s brilliant Russification of Sheridan’s Duenna went like a dream from start to finish, with superb singing and playing and a well-organised semi-staging. There were traces of weariness in Boris Godunov. But these were mere specks on the surface of a revelatory performance of this fascinating but problematic masterpiece.

In opting for the original 1869 version, Gergiev was perhaps making a play for rarity value — not easily achieved in London these days. But while it reduces the cast and duration, it creates problems for the singers. Musorgsky first came to Pushkin’s drama after trying to set Gogol’s comedy Marriage as a syllable-by-syllable prose opera, and something of the same approach survives, much softened, in the first Boris.