The Metropolitan Opera's new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is so bright, so impish and in its energy so reflective of the dazzling score it dramatizes that it's a shame to say that it represents a waste of talent. But it does.
Composed in 1932, Dmitri Shostakovich's second and last opera is one of the finest scores of the 20th century, a passionate and bawdy setting of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 short story. This tale of a frustrated, lascivious and ultimately homicidal rural housewife and her working-class lover boosted Shostakovich's art to a new level of technical assurance and emotional maturity,...