From around the world: Los Angeles. (North America).(Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk)(Opera Review)

The hoodoos that have bedeviled Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, almost since its premiere, performed double duty in Los Angeles this past October. As with the see-sawing fortunes of the composer himself, however, the final notes were of triumph hard-won and deserved.

Anticipation had run high for the announced third offering in Los Angeles Opera's seventeenth season, Prokofiev's War and Peace, in the same lollapalooza Kirov Opera production that had run at the Met last season--underwritten, as at the Met, by financier Alberto Vilar. It was not to be, however. Los Angeles Opera encountered a $600,000 shortfall in advance expenses, which Vilar declined to meet; the Shostakovich opera, in a 1996 Kirov production reportedly costing $1 million less than the Prokofiev, was substituted.

But fate continued to intervene. In early October, word reached the company that George Tsypin's Kirov sets for Lady Macbeth, bound by ship from St. Petersburg to the Port of Los Angeles, were becalmed off the California coast by a labor lockout and would be diverted instead to Tokyo (where the company was later to perform). Ten days before the scheduled opening (Oct. 23), the company's carpenters and stage crew, armed with a duplicate set of Tsypin's blueprints (with instructions in Russian), set out to rebuild the massive farmhouse and the ingenious sliding walls of the Russian design. The sound of hammering resounded through the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as late as 5 P.M. on opening night; two hours later, however, the curtain's on-time rise was greeted by relieved cheers.

Irina Molostova's staging reflected the 1860-ish setting of Nikolai Leskov's ...