The week in classical: Khovanshchina; Carmen review – the parallels with modern Russia are unmissable

Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg; Royal Opera House, LondonMussorgsky’s apocalyptic unfinished opera is given a fierce new lease of life by the McBurney brothers, Esa-Pekka Salonen and an exceptional young mezzo. And not even illness can keep a great Carmen downDawn over the Moskva River. The bells of the Kremlin, deep and massive, toll. Red Square, deserted in the early morning, is pocked with the violence of a mob uprising the night before. Russia is in turmoil. So begins Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81), unfinished at his death from alcoholic delirium at the age of 42, and one of the unsolved riddles of the operatic repertoire. This grand, sprawling work opened the 2025 Salzburg Easter festival, well suited to this year’s theme of “wounds and wonders”, in a compelling new production conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and performed by an international cast and musicians from Salonen’s homeland, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.With sleuth-like determination over eight years and counting, he and a creative team led by the British fraternal partnership of director Simon McBurney and composer Gerard McBurney – fondly referred to in Salzburg as the McBrothers – presented a world-premiere staging of a new version of the opera. Originally intended for the Bolshoi theatre, Moscow in 2020, first Covid and then the invasion of Ukraine put paid to any such plan. Khovanshchina is steeped in the Russian psyche. Mussorgsky, grappling with his country’s schismatic social and religious history, saw the past in the present. Using factual sources, he wrote his own idiosyncratic libretto, taking the so-called Khovansky Affair of the late 17th century as his starting point: Old Believers rise up against the westernising reforms of a regime that would lead to the rule of Peter the Great. Continue reading...

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