Suite from the Opera 'Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District' (1991)

Considered from a host of viewpoints, Dmitri Shostakovich's achievement is staggering. He realistically depicted the lowly status of Russian women and laid bare the hypocrisy and brutality of Soviet society; and in one great gesture he created a musical vocabulary all his own, using the orchestra with novel mastery and virtuosity."

Thus conductor James Conlon began an essay he wrote for Opera News in 1994. With its earthy and graphic approach to sex and violence, and its sardonic view of Soviet society, the opera was a huge success when it first opened in 1934. Two years later, Stalin attended a performance and those same qualities were suddenly liabilities. A denunciation of the work appeared in Pravda, the government newspaper, and the opera was soon withdrawn, not to be staged again in the Soviet Union until after Stalin's death, and even then only in a bowdlerized revision.

Shostakovich and Alexander Preys wrote the four-act libretto based on Nikolai Leskov's story about the passions of a small-town merchant's wife. Bored and oppressed, Katerina takes a lover from among her husband's workers. When her father-in-law discovers the affair, she poisons him; when her husband returns home, she and her lover Sergei strangle him. The pair wed and plotted to assume the family business when their crimes are uncovered. Now convicts, Sergei abandons Katerina for another woman prisoner; Katerina pushes her rival into a river and then dives in herself.

Shostakovich uses the orchestra throughout as a vehicle for commentary and subtext, as well as for realistic evocations. Orchestral interludes tie the scenes together, and it is the orchestra that summons - sometimes humorously, sometimes savagely - ironic suggestions of dance hall and circus. [...]

John Henken, Los Angeles Philharmonic's Director of Publications