Metropolitan Opera – Shostakovich’s The Nose. October 8, 2013.

Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, Balcony (Seat C117, $87.50).

Conductor – Valery Gergiev; Kovalyov – Paulo Szot, Police Inspector – Andrey Popov, The Nose – Alexander Lewis.

Story.  Kovalyov gets a shave in Yakovlevich’s barbershop, and the barber finds a nose in a loaf of bread the next day.  As he tries to dispose of it, he is taken in by the police for questioning.  When Kovalyov discovers he is missing his nose, he goes about looking for it.  He first finds it grown in size and dressed as a Sate Councilor, but it escapes.  Kovalyov then goes on a quest to get his nose back, to no avail.  Eventually, the nose is arrested, beaten back to its normal size, and returned to Kovalyov  After a few unsuccessful attempts in reattaching the nose, Kovalyov finally succeeds, to his great joy.

First, let me prove that I can be very positive about things of this sort by writing a short summary.

This delightfully-staged and well-executed opera illustrates the absurdity of life through the tumultuous, farcical, and ultimately successful yet trivial pursuit of a person’s quest.  Under the precise direction of Maestro Gergiev, the orchestra produced a crispy sound very much in harmony with the excellent and well-time comedy happening on stage.  The audience was engrossed by the great singing of the artists, and the atonal music actually helped propel the story along effortlessly. The thunderous applause at curtain call was a fitting conclusion to a most enjoyable evening.

I guess I am still smarting from a remark someone left on this blog.  This time, however, I didn’t quote from the opera’s advertisement.  The paragraph above is entirely my own, and mostly true.

Actually, I am beginning to like Shostakovich.  This is quite a change in attitude from my days as a student reporter (for a major Hong Kong newspaper) during my high school years.  I now readily recall how much I enjoyed his cello concerto and his string quartet.  The cello concerto was written when he was in his 50s, the string quarter (No. 15) in his 60s.  This opera, however, was written when he was 22.  The Playbill notes, which I read in advance, talks about the score as being difficult to categorize, atonal, and non-lyrical (even “anti-lyrical,” whatever that means).  While all that may be true, I did find the music to be taut and sensible, and there are some passages that can be passed off as lyrical (even they may be satirical in intention.)  While the overall instrumentation is complex, most of the music is on the simple side.  Oftentimes the vocal parts have an instrument double, and the effect is quite pleasant.  I suspect I will never learn in depth how Shostakovich’s music evolved over his career, but I am sure it has been quite a few music school theses over the years.

The staging is clever and pleasant.  In addition to the set, there are projections that keep the audience glued to what was happening on stage.  There are these projected shadows that eventually coalesce into a portrait of Shostakovich and Stalin (I think) that are cleverly done.  It makes me think of Picasso’s cubism (no kidding) where he disassembles an object (often a naked woman) and then paints a portrait that only the initiated can understand (I am not among them.)  Another clever technique is the continuation of an action (say running on a catwalk) with a shadow projection.  In additional to the Met titles in front of every seat, the English translation is also projected onto the stage, sometimes on the ledge at the front, sometimes as a prop-like object in the back.  In theory the concert-goer doesn’t have to move his head up and down constantly; in practice I found it a bit confusing.

The main page of the program shows only three members in the cast.  One would think this opera would be a three-person show.  The detailed listing of the Acts and Scenes, however, shows a long list of names (some duplicates.)  There are 70 sung roles (per Playbill), although some can be combined, and lots of chorus members.  At curtain call there are 30 or so people who came out to take a bow.  Indeed some of the sung roles are quite substantial – I can think of Podtochina and her daughter, the pretzel vendor, the barber and his wife.  In that regard, the nose itself didn’t do a lot of singing, even though it is the title role and is on stage quite a bit.  I wonder how people decide what roles are the headliner ones.

How much does the opera cause me to think about the trivialities of life?  I am typing this about 14 hours after seeing the show, and the answer is “not much.”  And the applause was warm but far from thunderous.

It was a pleasant two hours of comedy and interesting music, though.  The New York Times review sings praises to all aspects of the opera.