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- Paulo Szot in
The Nose
(photo by Sara Krulwich)
The Nose
by Dmitri Shostakovich
Directed by William Kentridge
Conducted by Valery Gergiev
Metropolitan Opera, New York City
With Paulo Szot (Kovalyov), Andrei Popov (Police Inspector), Gordon Gietz (The Nose)
Dmitri Shostakovich was 22 years old when he composedThe Nose
, and it shows – the comic three-act opera, based on an absurdist story by nineteenth-century satirist Nikolai Gogol, should be a whimsical flight of fancy that brandishes a sardonic edge and skewers social hierarchy and bureaucracy in St. Petersburg, a ridiculous metropolis awash with sanctimony and paranoia. But the work, laboring beneath Shostakovich’s jagged, dissonant style, is regrettably bloated and unfocused. It turns an inspired sketch into a pastiche of incoherent elements that showcase the young, brilliant composer’s free-reigning imagination, but also his gleeful neglect of structure and mindful storytelling. The opera is a resplendent mess – daring and surreal, but too haphazard to be engaging or make much narrative sense.