Live from Aix 2011: The Nose

The Aix Festival moved indoors to the Grand Theatre de Provence for the fourth of this season’s five operas opening this week, with William Kentridge’s explosively imaginative production of Shostakovich’s The Nose. Kentridge, an acclaimed South African artist and director, is known for collage-like, hand-made animated film, but that’s only one of the many techniques he lets loose with in this effervescent gem, a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera that premiered in New York last year.

 

It’s hard to believe that The Nose, Russian author Nicolaï Gogol’s ferocious satire of Russian society, was written in 1836, and the bureaucracy under fire was not Soviet but Czarist. Nearly a century after the novella was first published, the 21-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich chose Gogol’s mordantly comic, absurdist classic as the basis for his first opera—a work radically avant-garde for its day, and much influenced by the Dada and Constructivist movements of the early 20th century.

 

The opera sticks closely to Gogol’s original tale, recounted in 13 scenes by a huge cast and chorus.  The Saint Petersburg college official Kovaliov wakes up one morning to find that his nose is missing and rushes to the police station to report it, just as the barber Yakovlevich’s wife finds a nose in the loaf of bread she has just baked. Kovaliov dashes to the police station to report the lost nose, and then to the local newspaper to put an ad in the lost-and-found column. Meanwhile, escaped from the barber, the independent nose has grown to the size of a small adult, sprouted jaunty little legs and gone on a walkabout around town.

 

In Kentridge’s deliriously ingenious, wildly colorful vision, the ensuing mayhem is akin to a Monty Python show on surrealist speed. The small barbershop opens out of a niche high up on a newspaper-collage wall (motto: “We Also Let Blood”) and Kovaliov’s bedroom opens out of another at floor level, where his giant manservant appears to reside in the wardrobe cabinet. The ambulatory nose alternates between a three-foot-tall paper maché version and a shadow-theatre puppet silhouette as it climbs stairs, crosses bridges, goes to church to pray, is offered some snuff and mounts a skeletal silhouette steed. Slogans and chapter headings circle across the backdrop screen: “Everything Breathes Deceit”; The Capital Is Arched Like A Wild Cat”; “This Is No Poodle”.

 

The controlled chaos is powered by the raucous score, with drum bursts and cymbals, moaning horns, frantic flutes and the principal voices often at odds in shouting matches. Kazushi Ono conducts the Lyon National Opera Orchestra with exuberant verve, and at times it all gets way past any legal decibel levels. At an hour and 45 minutes with no intermission, it’s a bit too long for such a noisy one-nose joke, but there’s no doubt that Kentridge richly deserved his opening night ovation.

Upcoming next: Handel’s Acis and Galatea