Shostakovich's The Nose Saturday Matinee Broadcast

The Metropolitan Opera presents Dmitri Shostakovich's 1930 The Nose as the Saturday matinee on March 13. Classic 99.1 KFUO-FM will carry the broadcast beginning at 12:00 noon (CT). Approximate running time 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Three critics for the New York Times discuss the music, the art and the literary threads of the Met's new production of The Nose here. Roberta Smith comments,

"For the most part I enjoyed "The Nose," both visually and musically. I was amazed at how modern Shostakovich sounded, maybe not in a totally good way. At times it almost seemed like very daring musical comedy. The score seemed full of wit and at times more than a little bathos, as when Kovalyov moped around after his nose."

Click here to view a trailer for The Nose, featuring animation by William Kentridge; Catherine Meyburgh, video compositor and editor.

From the Met's web site:

Artist William Kentridge defies genres with Shostakovich’s adaptation of Gogol’s story. "The opera is about the terrors of hierarchy," Kentridge says. "There’s a mixture of anarchy and the absurd that interests me. I love in this opera the sense that anything is possible." The new production is conducted by definitive Shostakovich interpreter Valery Gergiev. Acclaimed baritone Paulo Szot, who won a Tony Award® for South Pacific, makes his Met debut as the man who wakes up to discover that his nose has disappeared.

As a contemporary of Konstantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold, Shostakovich was a part of the Russian artistic movements of the early twentieth-century. Based on a story by Nikolay Gogol, "Nos" ("The Nose") Shostakovich’s operatic incarnation by the same name was meant to inject a modern freshness into Soviet opera. While the adventures of a wayward, personified proboscis seemed like "modern" and "fresh" material for opera, tolerance for these sorts of efforts were being quashed by authorities who supported the socialist agenda and Shostakovich’s first opera suffered greatly. After only 16 performances, it was withdrawn from the Malïy Theatre in Leningrad not to resurface—at least not in the Soviet Union -- until 1974.

From Anthony Tommasini's March 6 New York Times review of the Met's debut performance of The Nose:

Musically you are not likely to hear a more insightful, ornery and, when appropriate, achingly poignant account of Shostakovich’s still-shocking score than the performance the conductor Valery Gergiev drew from the Met orchestra and chorus and the large cast: some 30 artists, singing about 80 solo roles. It was a breakthrough night for the baritone Paulo Szot in his Met debut as Kovalyov, the beleaguered petty bureaucrat who awakens one morning to find his nose missing.

This unconventional opera, which Shostakovich wrote at 22, had its premiere in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1930. The dissonant, brutal score was instantly condemned by Soviet authorities, and the work was not performed again in Russia until 1974. It is time to reassess this opera, and the Met deserves thanks for championing it.