Boris Godunov At Royal Opera House

Bryn Terfel makes the title role of Mussorgsky’s flawed masterpiece his own in a powerful new staging of the rarely seen original version.

For the first time, the Royal Opera is presenting the original 1869 version of the score, the seven scenes played straight through without an interval, rather than the “definitive” version that Mussorgsky completed three years later. With Antonio Pappano and the orchestra emphasising the muscularity of Mussorgsky’s writing, catching the edge of rawness that the original scoring offers, it all provides the space for Boris’s steady mental disintegration to be the true centre of the drama. Richard Jones has conceived a new production that is typically quirky and intelligent. Its look is garish like a comic strip and gives a clear-cut account that captures the big crowd scenes and the opera’s more intimate moments. “But what a superlative performance Terfel gives, dramatically powerful, vocally refined. His great bear of a Boris – wild-eyed, wild-haired, wild-bearded – commands the stage.” (The Daily Mail) “Terfel sings with a ghostly lightness, as if his great, golden voice had been reduced to a sickly pallor. The effect is terrible and terrific.” (The Observer)

Approx. 130 min. | A production of Royal Opera House, Covent Garden