Rating: 
Summary: IT IS A SIN TO REMOVE PARTS of the SCORE
Review: The Performance is very good...I have seen better Live performances...yet, be it a very rarely-performed work of Shostakovich, it is convenient to have the disc for reference. The opera as a dramatic piece, however, cannot possibly be interpreted normally, since parts are brutally removed and the opera is shortened.
Rating: 
Summary: Bargain recording - mediocre film
Review: The soundtrack is the best thing about this release - this is the recording made by Rostropovitch, Vishnevskaya et al towards the end of the great Russian soprano's career. By buying this DVD you get that splendid recording for less than the CD version. But you also get a film superimposed on the recording with variable results. There are the usual problems with lip-synching but it does attempt to be a real film of the piece. But the director has opted for a sort of romanticised realism which is essentially decorative rather than insightful. Opera is not a realistic medium, of course, so this film is no more successful than others in finding a solution for this ongoing problem. Has any director other than Bergman (with Mozart's Magic Flute) made a film of an opera which works on its own terms?
Rating:
Summary: Ready for Soft-Core Shostakovich?
Review: This disc is not for everyone, but it may be just the thing for some. What's not clear until you pop it in the player is that the audio is essentially just the 1979 (?) Rostropovich/Vishnevskaya recording of the opera, so if you leave the TV off you essentially have a one-disc copy of that recording ... which I didn't, and so I am delighted with it on that basis alone. Turn on the set however, and things get wild. Director Petr Weigl has taken a cast of Czechs who may or may not have musical backgrounds, including a voluptuous and otherwise easy-on-the-eyes heroine, and had them lip-synch along with the recording in costume and on sets suggesting pre-Revolutionary Russia. The lip-synching isn't quite as laughable as some of the old Godzilla movies, but it's not always completely accurate and convincing, either. Added to that is the fact that Vishnevskaya's dusky, mature voice seems to be inappropriate to the twentysomething girl from whom it is supposedly emanating. But of course, none of that matters as soon as the sex gets started. I've never seen this opera staged, but I imagine that the ravishing is more "suggested" in the theatre, whereas here it's simulated explicitly, if not clinically, with lots of nudity and thrashing about. I'm reluctant to speculate about whether the late composer would have been more amused or annoyed by this video, probably dismissing it in either case as tasteless; more interesting is the question of what his still-very-much-alive close friends, Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, might make of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Tacky
Review: This movie features (most of) the soundtrack of the best recording of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk available. The film which was (twenty odd years later) slapped on top of that brilliant sound recording, served little other purpose than as a vehicle for once-locally-famous Czech soft porn actress and media-slag (Hrubesova). It's so tacky and has such a cheesy video-look that it makes the sound recording seem mediocre, where taken on its own, it's brilliant. Shostakovich's opera includes some violence and sex which does appear on stage in live performances. In this film it looks like some sort of pseudo-artsy and highly unbelievable soft porn flick. To give an example, the fat woman who gets raped (they show it with dim warm lighting) acts like she is being tickled with a feather, which is not the idea that the score portrays. There are also a lot of very '90's looking men with really the sort of buffed symetrical appearance you get from working in a gym, and not the rugged look you'd have among people who perform manual labour all day. Or in the bedroom scene with Katerina and Sergei - their textbook writhings allow embarrasing glimpses at the one part of Sergei which should (judging by Hrubesova's movement) be most 'involved', but which we clearly see in an entirely different condition and nowhere near where it would have to be to cause the effect she is displaying. You can also see a little piece of cloth between them sometimes, when clearly nothing of that sort is meant to be there. Fair enough, the cloth is there even if you don't see it, but the fact that all this is shown makes their 'beast with two backs' act seem ridiculous and insulting. It's actually a matter of bad editing (and bad taste). It doesn't add up, and even absent-mindedly making little mental notes of these inconsistencies is a somewhat unpleasant experience, again, especially because what the music itself conveys is so clearly real. As another viewer with me said, 'if they're going to be so literal in showing them at it, they should at least have edited out the bit of cloth between them'. This paradox of it being too literal and too fake at once applies not just to the sex scenes, but to the whole film in general. It's rather insulting really in how fake it is. The film as a whole is just so cheap and lacks the tight and oppressive atmosphere of the score. The CD of the complete opera is available from amazon.com and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Vishnevskaya is miraculous, and the conducting by her husband Rostropovich (both personal friends of the composer) is inspired. Rostropovich and Shostakovich studied composition together, and although not all of Rostropovich's recordings of Shostakovich are first rate, this is the definitive (and most alive) rendition. It probably always will be. Buy the CD, and pass up on the DVD.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for What It Is
Review: This performance is not original, but based on an abbreviated version of the Rostropovich/Vishnevskaya recording, the only one available. This score is one of the masterpieces of the 20th Century, a magnificent work. The movie brings it down to 100 minutes, presumably for manageable length. Anyone expecting to hear the whole score is going to be disappointed, but so what? This is not an opera that is frequently performed even in opera houses, so I'm grateful to the director for what there is. Time Magazine, reviewing the opera at its Met premiere in 1934, referred to the music in the love/rape scenes as `pornophony'. The director certainly got that right. The prudish or the parents of a muscially gifted minor should be warned that these scenes leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. As both actors are attractive and the action is indicated in the music (Time was absolutely right), I found these scenes appropriate and interesting, as well as erotic. The negative occurs in the staging of the finale. These must be the best dressed, most humanely treated Siberian exiles in history. No chains, no prison garb, none of the degradation of mind and spirit that motivates the heroine's suicide. The criticism here is precisely the opposite of the praise of the intimate scenes, that the staging and music do not match. All the more puzzling, as the scene is set out of doors and realism could have been easily achieved. All in all, people who like the opera, who are fascinated by Shostakovich, or who simply want an approachable version of an masterpiece should have this disc. You're not likely to get another, and what's good in it is very good. The reviewer above who described this work musically as mediocre is not worthy of credence. Even the edited version here is musically superb.
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