Barcelona.(International)(Boris Godunov)(Opera Review)

The worldwide movement to return Baroque operas to their original length usually means producing much longer performances. But in the case of Boris Godunov, the road to authenticity leads to a much shorter--and more vibrant, more focused--work. Modest Mussorgsky's known score, which about twenty years ago displaced in critical favor the traditional Rimsky-Korsakov reorchestration, is already somewhat shorter, with harder edges and more impressive choral scenes, than the sanitized version of Boris that made this opera known to the world. But Mussorgsky's original piece (the one rejected by the reading committee at Saint Petersburg's Imperial Theater in 1871) is really short--a one-act affair lasting little more than two hours.

This bare-bones Godunov, which could be seen and heard in Spain for the first time in October at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, has no Polish act (no Marina, no Rangoni), no love scenes and almost nothing but politics. The abrupt turns and dissonances in the music that so annoyed the Imperial Theater's reading committee bring the work surprisingly closer to the musical world of Shostakovich than to Mussorgsky's contemporaries Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Willy Decker's production (originally for De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam) takes full advantage of the compressed action, effectively moving the characters inside a metal box. The Tsar's descent into the hell of his inner guilt is represented by the hard, cold walls that trap him. Absolute power is symbolized by a huge golden chair, which at the beginning of the action, when Russia has no master, is lying on its "knees." The people straighten the chair up to install the new monarch; when the Duma discusses Boris's delirium, the chair is again fallen; and in the final scene, to tremendous effect, the populace ...