Given the recent intensification of the English National Opera crisis, the company's revival of Khovanshchina gains intense resonance. Mussorgsky's tremendous chronicle, set in the Russia of Peter the Great, deals with the wastage of lives attendant on the establishment of autocracy.
The Tsar - unseen, though omnipresent - moves in to destroy three groups of people deemed superfluous: the aristocratic Khovansky family, dominated by the arrogant Prince Ivan and his sensualist son, Andrey; the circle round Prince Golytsin, the corrupt advisor to the previous regime, and the Old Believers, a religious sect led by Dosifey, who would sooner his followers face martyrdom than submit to temporal authority.
Though Mussorgsky observes the ambivalences of his characters by suspending moral judgment, the sense of cumulative outrage is inescapable. With the autocrats that currently run ENO taking the recent decision to wreck the lives of a third of its chorus by making them redundant, the first night had the potential to become inflammatory.
In fact, apart from leaflets being distributed, nothing of the sort occurred. The work proved protest enough, while the chorus - and in Mussorgsky, the chorus is an essential protagonist - sang as if their lives depended on it.
The conducting, from Oleg Caetani, was by turns supple and monumental, while the casting, a couple of minor characters apart, was exemplary. Willard W White's Ivan, charismatic though his voice isn't quite what it was, was pitted against David Rendall's repellent Golytsin and John Tomlison's tragic Dosifey.
The greatest performance came from American mezzo Jill Grove as Marfa, alarming in her depiction of the woman's conflict between religious devotion and uncontrollable desire for Tom Randle's sexy, dissolute Andrey.
Francesca Zambello's production, first seen in 1994, remains her finest achievement. She kicks the opera off in period, then increasingly builds in 20th century allusions, lurching into a horrific present as the Old Believers commit mass suicide.
· In rep until February 23
