A figure with the head of a doll plays with a multicoloured spinning top, high above the stage. Three men – hooded and armed – creep forwards and seize him, slashing his throat and dragging him off.
It’s a brutal start to a brutal opera. This flashback is the brainchild of director Richard Jones (in his 2016 Royal Opera production, revived for the second time by Ben Mills, we see it replayed twice more as an episode that haunts the protagonist), but the overriding atmosphere is Mussorgsky’s. Based on Pushkin’s drama about a tsar’s reign, Boris Godunov is among the darkest of all operas. In the composer’s lean, mean original version, it is almost relentlessly so: dominated by low voices, its orchestration dense and heavy, the seven scenes push inexorably towards crisis.
In this context, pacing is everything. Conductor Mark Wigglesworth kept up the momentum, maximising the contrast between the score’s muddiest, most overblown passages, where monumental slabs of lower brass were almost obliterated by the tolling of bells, and the light cast periodically by finely blended high woodwind. When not inaudible – did those tintinnabulations need to be quite so catastrophic? – the strings were vital to this musical chiaroscuro, by turns fidgety and tender, roughly hewn and spun into a single, delicate thread.
In Jones’s production, the drama plays out in a single, beautifully lit set: a cavernous charcoal-grey box with a small, bright yellow, low-ceilinged chamber above. The chorus is clad in regulation peasant-drab until ordered to dress brightly for Boris’s coronation. The Boyars sport matching jaw-length 1970s bobs and everyone onstage is slightly grubby – except the hostess (a cameo played here by Susan Bickley in a stroke of deluxe casting) who is a one-woman colour pop. There’s an opening burst of movement as the chorus dashes around frantically and the painful physical progress of Adam Palka’s elderly monk Pimen, whose “chronicle” becomes a vast panel of paintings he drags across the stage to stress the nature of his burden. The light-relief “monks” in the tavern scene bob around cartoonishly.
Mostly, however, this is a production that frames the singing as the main event. Among an impressive cast, Palka and Andrii Kymach (as the Boyar’s clerk Andrei Shchelkalov) stood out as especially compelling, while Robert Berry-Roe was exceptionally assured in the treble role of Boris’s son. In promising house debuts, Alexander Roslavets was an ideally thuggish Varlaam and Jamez McCorkle sumptuously treacle-voiced as Grigory Otrepiev. Best of all was Bryn Terfel in the title role he has taken in this production since its debut. His tsar is unmistakeably troubled: wild-eyed, with violent consonants, grim giggles and lurches into barking. But Terfel’s voice also remains supple and rich, its beauty insisting on this complex character’s ultimate humanity.
