Modest Mussorgsky, Sorochintsy Fair (1880)

A pleasant surprise from Operavision; a less-performed unfinished Mussorgsky opera than Khovanshchina, though if I understand aright, it's probably finished to a comparable degree. It has, unsurprisingly, been completed by various people over the years, but the Komische Oper Berlin version is the one completed by Vissarion Shebalin (hardly a household name), which is the most common version. And it's a comedy, no less! Boris and Khovanschina are more or less of a kind, but this is very different.

Good god, where to start? So the supernatural backstory is that a devil was thrown out of Hell and pawned his overcoat at the local pub. He's going to redeem it a year later, but in the meantime, it was sold, and now he haunts the village, looking for his dang ol' overcoat. That's actually not very relevant as a plot point, but it hangs over the whole show. The plot is that Parasya wants to marry Gritsko, which her father is okay with, but her stepmother is against. So that's bad. The stepmother, Khivrya, has a lover, a local priest. He's there when her husband comes home with his drinking buddies, and there's some comical business where she tries to hide him. Gritsko has a dream about a witches' sabbath. The two lovers are going to get married in spite of stepma. And...that's it.

If that doesn't sound like much of a plot, well, it's not. That might be because it's incomplete--a lot of plot threads just trail off--but I get the strong impression that the incompleteness is basically in the music, and this is how it was always going to be. It strongly reminded me of Rimsky-Korsakov's May Night: a strongly folk-inflected, plot-light opera about drunken peasants futzing around, with some supernatural elements. And there's a good reason for this similarity: both that and this are based on stories from Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which I now kind of want to read.

So you really just have to take the story for the shambolic sort of thing it is, but the music is very good. As why wouldn't it be? As I said, very folk-y. This version interpolates "Night on Bald Mountain" into the dream sequence, which is appropriate and awesome. The production I found highly effective, being a kind of minimalistic thing with more or less period costumes and a lot of green lighting. As for the case, my vote for VIP is Agnes Zwierko as Khivrya. She's very good and very funny.

I mean, okay, nobody would probably call this a major piece of work, but especially given how few Mussorgsky operas there are, we should be glad to have a third one. This was recorded in 2017 but isn't available on disc, which raises the disturbing question: you had this recording all the time, but you were just...sitting on it? What the heck? I suppose it must've streamed somewhere at the time, but man. Why hide your light under a bushel? Free the operas!