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Shostakovich's The Nose In Metropolitan Opera Premiere

Feb. 26, 2010

On March 5, Dmitri Shostakovich's three-act opera The Nose receives its Metropolitan Opera premiere, led by Valery Gergiev, in a genre defying production directed by William Kentridge. An absurdist drama based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story about a man who, in an odd turn of events, loses his nose, the opera is fittingly imbued with music of dark witticism that is both effusively playful and intensely dramatic.

Kentridge’s production, which runs through March 25, cleverly utilizes the set as a large video projection screen with striking results. Images of the nose are often superimposed over Soviet archival footage in order to capitalize on the ridiculous nature of the story itself and to enhance the existing tale by further establishing the nose’s exploits.

“There’s a big question:  Is tragedy or comedy a way of dealing with huge social cataclysms?” Kentridge explains in a video interview. “And Gogol’s answer and Shostakovich’s answer, in this opera, is [that it’s] very much through the strange mixture of the brutal comic that we get closest to the actual logic of the world.”

Valery Gergiev conducts The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and baritone Paulo Szot makes his Metropolitan Opera debut as Kovalyov, the man with the missing appendage.  Shostakovich's masterful first opera completed when he was just 22, The Nose was first performed in January, 1930 in Leningrad and sees six performances this month at The MET.

Learn more about The Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Nose at www.metoperafamily.org.

For more on the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, visit www.universaledition.com.

Dmitri Shostakovich
The Nose (1927-28)
opera in three acts and one epilogue
libretto (Rus) by Yevgeni Zamyatin, Georgi Ionin, Alexander Preis and the composer, based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, high tenor, 2 tenors, baritone, bass-baritone and SATB chorus
1(pic, afl).1(ca).1(Ebcl, bcl).1(cbsn)-1.1(cornet).1.0-balalaika, 2 small domra, 2 alt domra-9perc-2hp.pno-str
103’

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