Komische Oper Berlin – Season 2025/2026  
“LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK”
Opera in four acts, Libretto by Alexander Preis based on the novelle by Nikolai Leskow.
Music by Dmitri Shostakovich   
Boris Timofeyevich Izmailov/Ghost of Boris Timofeyevich DMITRY ULYANOV
Zinoviy Borisovich Izmailov ELMAR GILBERTSSON
Katerina Lvovna Izmailova AMBUR BRAID
Sergei SEAN PANIKKAR
Aksinya MIRKA WAGNER
Shabby Peasant CASPAR KRIEGER
Priest DIMITRY IVASHCHENKO
Sergeant MARCELL BAKONYI
Sonyetka SUSAN ZARRABI
Old Convict STEPHEN BRONK
Porter JUNOH LEE
A female convict ELISA MAAYESHI
Teacher THOMA JARON­WUTZ
First Workman / Coachman VOLKER HERDEN
Second Workman TAIKI MIYASHITA
Third Workman / Messenger PHILIPP SCHREYER
Steward / Sentry EZRA JUNG
Policeman CARSTEN LAU
Orchester & Chorsolisten der Komischen Oper Berlin
Conductor James Gaffigan
Chorus David Cavelius
Production Barrie Kosky
Stage Rufus Didwiszus
Costumes Victoria Behr
Light Olaf Freese
Berlin, 8 February 2026
One could not imagine a better setting: Berlin is experiencing its coldest winter in 16 years and the Komische Oper is presenting a 20th-century masterpiece, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Dmitri Shostakovich, whose title character Katerina Izmailova is sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour in Siberia, known as katorga in Russian, together with her lover Sergei. When one considers that the young composer enjoyed enormous success with his second opera in 1934, but fell out of favour with Stalin only two years later and had to fear sharing Katerina’s fate, one leaves the theatre with a feeling of unease, which is intensified by Barrie Kosky’s non-romantic staging and the Siberian-like winter in Berlin. Shostakovich reworked the piece, which had been banned in the Soviet Union, and it premiered in Moscow in 1963 as Katerina Izmailova during Nikita Khrushchev’s thaw period. Two years before his death in 1975, he attended the premiere at the Deutsche Staatsoper in East Berlin. His close friend, the renowned cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, rediscovered the score of the original version and recorded it idiomatically in 1978 with his wife Galina Vishnevskaya and Nicolai Gedda for EMI in London. Barrie Kosky, former director of the Komische Oper, stages the piece without Russian folklore, apart from the kokoshnik, the traditional headdress worn by the bride Katerina (costumes by Victoria Behr). Rufus Didwiszus builds a mixture of car park and concrete courtyard to evoke a sense of loss, desolation and dreariness. The production does not manage entirely without furniture, especially the bed, although not necessarily in the places one might expect. The famous Russian soul does not come across well in this production, and the singers, including the Chorsolisten der Komischen Oper Berlin, have to interact particularly well as performers in view of the emptiness of the stage in order to tell the hard-to-bear story of rape, severe abuse, multiple murder and suicide. We must not forget that Tsarist Russia did not abolish serfdom until 1861, around the time the plot is set. Kosky perfectly captures Shostakovich’s extremely rhythmic music, which is sometimes melodic and rooted in folk tones, sometimes stretched to the point of atonality and absurdity, translating it into the body language of the protagonists, even simulating sexual intercourse several times on stage. James Gaffigan and the Orchester der Komischen Oper Berlin are completely committed to the work, conjuring up the highest sound levels, sometimes not in favour of the singers, and revealing many of the intricate details of the multi-layered score. Given the extremely homogeneous performance of all those involved, it is hard to single out individual artists. Dimitry Ivashchenko as the drunken priest and, even more so, Dmitry Ulyanov as the malicious, instinct-driven Boris Timofeyevich have an idiomatic home game, which they skilfully use to explore the depths of the libretto. There is no doubt that their voices come close to the ideal of the Russian bass tradition. Non-native speakers cannot match this in terms of typical intonation, but they have to make up for this deficit by overcompensating vocally, which they manage to do quite successfully. First and foremost, it is Ambur Braid who, with her passionate and versatile soprano voice, takes centre stage as the frustrated, longing and ultimately desperate Katerina, both vocally and dramatically. She interacts perfectly with her father-in-law Boris Timofeyevich and later with her lover Sergei, who is played ideally by Sean Panikkar as a virile seducer, expanding his originally lyrical tenor voice to include dramatic tones and stretching it almost to character tenor. At the end of the sixth scene, Kosky ingeniously develops the most despicable moment of the performance, when the drunken shabby peasant begins to dance a round of violence, greed and lust. Having discovered Sinowis’s corpse while searching for vodka, he runs to the police, only to copulate enviously, vengefully and inhumanely with everything he has left in the lashing interlude to the seventh scene: the linen sacks full of flour and the corpse, magnificently played and sung by character tenor Caspar Krieger. While the individual protagonists interact in the first part, Kosky develops the dehumanisation of the masses in the second, first in the grotesque scene of the police choir with their knitting chief, in which the supposedly atheist teacher is simply shot dead. The subsequent wedding celebration is marked by drunkenness and the obtrusive Slava choir, in order to show in the final act all the despair and hopelessness of the prisoners on their neon-lit way to the katorga. The director finally has Katerina strangle her rival with one of her stockings and then shoot herself. The author leaves the theatre disturbed, knowing about Russian history with its lifelong forced labour, gulags and today’s labour camps. In 1989, he had the opportunity to meet a former gulag inmate in person in Tartu, Estonia. Photo Monika Rittershaus