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Triumph & Tension. A more impressive contribution to the Met's new season came later in the week with a Boris Godunov, orchestrated by Dmitry Shostakovich. In its 75-year history, Mussorgsky's roughhewn but powerfully felt work ("I lived on Boris and in Boris," the composer once said) has appeared in several versions, including two by the composer himself and two schmalzier ones by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov. This season the Met decided to try the version scored by Shostakovich in 1940 but never before presented on the U.S. stage. The result is a brassy, full-throated Boris, stridently dramatic and highly colored (especially when compared with the thinner, drier orchestration of Boris by Karol Rathaus previously used by the Met).
To match the flogging power of the Shostakovich orchestration, a first-rate cast was called for, and the Met supplied it: Giorgio Tozzi, Ezio Flagello, Norman Kelley, Kim Borg, Blanche Thebom. The immense chorus sang the English text (by John Gutman) with both volume and admirable clarity. But the clear triumph of the evening belonged to Baritone George London in the title role. His Boris, which he sang with great success during his recent tour of Russia, was passionate, anguished, suffused with an almost unbearable sense of racking inner tensions. As London played it last week, it clearly belonged among the finest characterizations in opera.