Performers

John Storgårds conductor
Ruth Knight director

Amanda Majeski Katerina
Brindley Sherratt Boris/Ghost of Boris 
John Findon Zinovy
Thomas Mole Mill-hand/Priest
Nicky Spence Sergey
Ava Dodd Aksinya/Convict
Ronald Samm Shabby Peasant
Alaric Green Steward
Chuma Sijeqa Police Sergeant 
William Morgan Teacher
Sir Willard White Old Convict
Niamh O’Sullivan Sonyetka 

BBC Singers
Chorus of English National Opera
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra 
Brass Section of the Orchestra of English National Opera

In Shostakovich’s anniversary year, a chance to hear his blistering operatic tragedy with an ‘innocent murderess’ at its heart. Amanda Majeski stars as Katerina – the defiant Lady Macbeth – with tenor Nicky Spence as her lover Sergey and Brindley Sherratt as the brutal patriarch Boris. 

This is a powerful story of the consequences of one woman’s desperate life of loneliness and oppression, Shostakovich’s opera speaks as clearly to us today as it did to Stalin’s Soviet Russia in the 1930s.
 
The opera takes place in a narrow-minded and provincial town of stifling mediocrity, where the male characters are impotent idiots, violent thugs, or both, and the women are almost all victims of physical and emotional abuse.
 
ENO gave the acclaimed UK stage premiere of the piece in 1987. It is an opera that deals with issues that matter. It exposes the human predicament through music and drama in a manner quite unlike any other art form: powerful, direct, revealing, unsettling.

For tickets and information https://www.royalalberthall.com