Attempts to ‘translate’ Tolstoy’s psychological masterpiece into other media have had varying degrees of failure: from the truly dismal Garbo film, which turns the novel’s subtle shifts of sympathy into black-white Mills & Boon, to the BBC adaptation which featured an Anna (Nicola Pagett) and Vronsky (Stuart Wilson) who came close to the characters incarnate, but which temporized with the parallel tale of Levin so feebly that it might as well not have bothered at all. Shchedrin certainly doesn’t, but his ballet score comes off better than either of the above – not to mention Iain Hamilton’s sketchy opera – because, like Tchaikovsky in Eugene Onegin, he was playing to an audience which could be presumed to know the novel inside out and he could therefore show fragments of the whole; he even follows Tchaikovsky’s example and calls his hour-and-a-half tribute ‘lyric scenes’.
The ‘take’ is not a comfortable one – no reason why it should be – nor an easy one to like. Tolstoy’s novel is ultimately devastating because, having meshed the outer and the inner lives so scrupulously and having shown us life’s way of restoring a measure of ‘normality’ after a series of crises, he suggests it might all have turned out differently for Anna. Shchedrin concentrates on the doom-laden aspects, no doubt because they are particularly suitable for choreography: not just the nightmarish event during the first meeting at the station, but also the central characters’ bad dreams, the first laden with hammering reiterated notes before passion sweeps all before it and then repeated in Act 2 (this could almost be Birtwistle in ritual repetition mode). Outward events – St Petersburg ceremonies where fragments of Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony momentarily surface, the celebrated Tsarskoye Selo races, the last scene at the opera (against a background of Bellini’s I Capuletti e i Montecchi) – only impinge briefly on the dreamlike sequence; the inner tensions of anguished violin lines and atmospheric chord-clusters are never far away.
Perhaps there’s too much of this in the first two acts, but it’s hard to imagine the uncontrollable agitation which drives Anna to an arbitrary fate more compellingly realized in orchestral terms. The rough-edged Russian recording plays its part in building up a sense of unbearable claustrophobia, though distortion at the few brassy climaxes puts it nearly beyond the pale (you can tell when they’re due by the tape pre-echoes). No recording date is given (one assumes some time shortly after the 1972 Bolshoi premiere): otherwise the documentation is thorough, including three sets of sometimes hard-to-translate observations – from Shchedrin’s wife, Maya Plisetskaya, not only the creator of the balletic Anna but also the protagonist in the Bizet/Shchedrin Carmen ballet (lucky her to dance the nineteenth century’s two most interesting heroines); from Boris Lvov-Anokhin, the ‘librettist’; and from Shchedrin himself, who “personally selected” this recording for Russian Disc’s Edition Rodion Shchedrin. One key performance the Edition won’t have, incidentally, is that of the opera Dead Souls, a work described by Yuri Temirkanov as the greatest Russian opera of the twentieth century and scheduled for BMG Melodiya release. Now that we have to hear.'