Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Famously despised (and suppressed) by Stalin, Shostakovich's lascivious, funny and scabrous work about a Russian housewife doing her best to navigate misogynist culture has managed to endure. Graham Vick's often eye-popping 1994 Met production, now in revival, brings the story into the Soviet era, with iceboxes, televisions and bright, optimistic color schemes doing their best to paper over the savage social reality. But the real draw is the master composer's vibrant score, which makes fun of everyone: the cops on the take; a clergyman too busy dancing and boozing to notice the murder in front of his face; patriarchal elders who confuse their unchecked privilege for erotic potency. Despite killing her husband and father-in-law, the only person who comes across sympathetically is the main character, lent a Shakespearean dimension by the opera's title. (She goes by Katerina Ismailova, inside the drama.) On opening night, the powerful dramatic soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek impressed in the lead role, inhabiting its sultry requirements as well as its tragic dimensions. And though conductor James Conlon is perhaps given to brooding excessively over some of the score's slower-moving passages, he can also whip the house's orchestra into a delirious, power-mad maelstrom. This great but rarely seen work is a highlight of the Met's notably strong fall season.