With upwards of 70 solo roles and a repertoire of grotesqueries apparently designed to put Wozzeck in the shade, The Nose was always calculated to be provocative. No wonder its first production in 1930 was reviewed (not unsympathetically) as The Hand-bomb of an Anarchist; and no wonder it soon fell foul of the increasingly vicious dumbing-down of the Soviet arts, not to be heard again in Russia until 1974 when Boris Prokovsky and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky mounted it at the Moscow Chamber Theatre. That production was immortalized in this classic recording, whose belated appearance on CD ought to be cause for unqualified celebration.
So it would be if artistic grounds were all. Goodness knows how much rehearsal it took to master the manic complexities of the score, but the sheer clarity and confidence in characterization achieved is little short of miraculous. Edvard Akimov scores a personal triumph as the physiognomically challenged Kovalyov, and Rozhdestvensky is on the ball throughout. Even the recording quality has by and large stood the test of time.
This was the biggest remaining gap in the Shostakovich CD discography, and we’ll be lucky to have anything to rival it in the foreseeable future. More’s the pity then that we get no libretto or translation. If you have access to that material, for instance in the old EMI LP set, you may not mind so much. If you don’t, I can’t see how you can ever get more than a surface impression of the piece. Even the otherwise helpful synopsis is silent about the insertion of a couple of minutes of text from the original story near the end, which Shostakovich only agreed to at the time of the 1974 production and which isn’t given in the (Russian-only) Complete Edition score.
Shostakovich’s other Gogol opera, the unfinished The Gamblers, also receives a wonderful performance, more full-blooded and idiomatic than either the recent Bolshoi version or Mikhail Yurovsky’s admirable account of Krzysztof Meyer’s completion. It makes a generous and appropriate filler, and it commutes what would otherwise be a resounding raspberry at Melodiya’s expense to an exasperated shrug.'