The opera is dedicated to his first wife (they had issues)
mainFiona Maddocks today on Birmingham Opera Company’s epochal staging of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
(The) action teems with rats, poisoned mushrooms, a dead husband in the chest freezer and plenty of adulterous pneumatic sex, noisily and graphically illustrated by the music. (The composer dedicated the work to his first wife. They had issues.)…
Lady Macbeth, BOC’s 50th production, is perhaps its most brilliant so far, praise in itself given the company’s impressive track record: Wozzeck, Fidelio, Otello; Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Tippett’s The Ice Break, Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht with its helicopter quartet among them, all subjected to Vick and his team’s daring, encompassing approach. The venue for this latest staging was the disused Tower Ballroom. Its central wooden dancefloor intact, it provided a ghostly backdrop to the staging: chorus wearing competition-style numbers, couples moving stiffly as if in a half-dead last dance.
Read on here.
BOC press picture
Let’s hope some video material emerges from this production? Although capturing these immersive promenade events on camera is only a kind of symbolic gesture…