Review: Paradise Moscow and Russian season
April 21, 2009
Date reviewed: 20 April 2009
Venue: Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House
According to Richard Mantle, general director of Opera North, Shostakovich’s “block-busting musical comedy”, Paradise Moscow, first performed by the company in 2001, has been one of the productions most requested for revival. In some ways the timing this year might seem a little unusual, with the 2008-9 season already top-heavy (or, possibly, top-light) with operetta. In another sense the timing is perfect, as Paradise Moscow sits in the middle of a splendid series of Russian-themed events at the Howard Assembly Room.
Paradise Moscow has lost nothing in the eight years since its first production except, perhaps, the quality of surprise. In the early stages the cast works a little too hard to justify the expectation of hilarity, but soon enough the sheer momentum of the production takes over as a museum’s moving statues give way to a manic car journey, with James Holmes’ conducting justifying his description of the music as “Offenbach recycled for a Tex Avery cartoon”. David Pountney’s idiomatic translation is as inventive as his production, but probably the key factor in the success of Paradise Moscow is the inspired re-orchestration by Gerard McBurney, with additions by James Holmes.
The plot is slight enough, the domestic traumas and eventful love lives of various people working on, or trying to move into, Cheryomushki, a new block of flats much desired by Muscovites. In what must have seemed a daring concept in 1950s Russia, they are thwarted at every turn by the corrupt party boss and his estate manager, but in the hands of Richard Angas and Richard Suart these prove no more threatening than the gangsters in Kiss Me Kate, even sharing a delightful comic duet that recalls ‘Brush up Your Shakespeare’.
Since 2001 Craig Revel Horwood has gone on to further fame (or notoriety), so his choreography has been revived by David Hulston, with the explosive duet between the newly emancipated museum guide Lidochka (Summer Strallen, a winning successor to Janie Dee) and the playboy Boris (a suitably self-regarding Eaton James) still a show-stopper. Claire Pascoe’s sturdy Rosie the Riveter construction worker and Margaret Preece’s opportunist gangster’s moll (surely an hommage to the late Wendy Richard) also stand out in an ensemble without a weak link, with the chorus as versatile and energetic as ever and the orchestra, percussion and brass to the fore, adding enormously to the fun.
Equally impressive is the Russian programme in the Howard Assembly Room, with four events surrounding the first night of Paradise Moscow. A 1997 film on the War Symphonies of Shostakovich and a presentation by Orlando Figes served to place the untypical merriment of Cheryomushki in context. Best of all, Sergei Leiferkus, a more than memorable Scarpia for Opera North 21 years ago, sang an outstanding programme of Russian songs culminating in Mussorgsky’s remarkable Songs and Dances of Death. Leiferkus, superbly accompanied by Julius Drake, brought his darkly intense baritone and compelling vocal characterisation to these varied presentations of death before relishing the saturnine humour of ‘The Song of the Flea’ as a tension-relieving encore.
-Ron Simpson
The Russian season finishes with New Babylon, a recently restored 1929 film with music by Shostakovich performed live by an ensemble from the Orchestra of Opera North on 16 and 17 May
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