Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Minskis one of the most gripping operas of the 20^th century. Written in 1934 during the darkest phase of the Stalinist period, it tells the story of the businessman’s wife Katerina Ismailova, who becomes a murderess in a horrific, male-dominated Russian world of greed, lust and violence. At the same time, the opera is a scathing satire on the political circumstances of the time when it was written. In his production, Andreas Homoki takes up on this aspect of the grotesque: he accentuates the sense of the ridiculous in the tragic character of the piece and the humorous side of the unfathomable. “The direction expertly jumps back and forth between the farcical and the tragic. The result is a musical drama that appears to glow, in both dramaturgical and musical terms,” was the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s verdict on the première.

This season will now see the return of this much-lauded production to the programme, with Gun-Brit Barkmin in the title role of Katerina Ismailova, as at the première. At the rostrum will be the young Vasily Petrenko, a recognised authority on the Russian repertoire. Shostakovich’s expressively imperious, grimacing music, deeply moving in its sympathy for the heroine, promises an extremely emotional evening of musical drama.