Bass René Pape, the world’s reigning Boris, reprises his overwhelming portrayal of the tortured
tsar caught between grasping ambition and crippling paranoia. Conductor Sebastian Weigle
leads Mussorgsky’s masterwork, a pillar of the Russian repertoire, in its original 1869 version,
which runs two-and-a-quarter hours with no intermission. Stephen Wadsworth’s affecting
production poignantly captures the hope and suffering of the Russian people as well as the tsar
himself.
Standard