Khovanshchina

Even if Modest Mussorgsky left his opera ‘Khovanshchina’ (The Khovansky Affair) incomplete and unorchestrated, the sheer theatricality of its musical text reveals the presence of a work that begs for a stage production. The first completion and orchestration was made by Mussorgsky’s contemporary Rimsky-Korsakov, but the more slender, powerful, raw orchestration made by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1960 is the one preferred today, and the version chosen by Kent Nagano for the Munich production recorded here. With his stripped-down sets and historicizing costumes, director Dmitri Tcherniakov, one of the new voices of contemporary Russian theater, throws a bridge to the political present. The historical pessimism of the opera, says Tcherniakov, ‘is legitimated by Russian history and Russian life. Basically, nothing has changed.’