You can see the thinking behind English National Opera’s new production of Boris Godunov. Musorgsky’s great epic drama exists in interchangeable versions, two of them by the manic, dissolute composer himself. In 1869, he completed a stark, brooding, seven-scene music drama that was rejected by the commissioning committee of the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. Five years later, a much expanded and revised “grand opera” Boris had its premiere there. Musorgsky provided the missing principal female role in the form of the scheming Polish princess, Marina Mnishek, and fleshed out the undeveloped part of the Pretender, “Tsarevich Dmitri”, Boris’s usurping successor. He dropped the haunting scene of Boris’s encounter with the yurodivy — holy fool or simpleton — outside St Basil’s Cathedral and tranferred his music to the end of the opera as a lament for the fate of Russia and its people after the triumphal march into the Kromy forest of the Pretender’s forces. Rimsky-Korsakov’s once-preferred orchestration conflated both Musorgsky’s versions, made cuts and added new music.

The original, seven-scene version is a godsend to less lavishly funded companies, although the stage directions still pose a challenge to contemporary designers. Tobias Hoheisel, creator of the set for Tim Albery’s dark, austere staging, simply ignores the various locations specified in Musorgsky’s own libretto. One could call it a Shakespearian approach, similar in spirit to that taken by Declan Donnellan in his Russian-

language staging of the Pushkin play — Musorgsky’s source — seen at the Barbican Theatre earlier this year. Albery and Hoheisel place the entire action inside a vertiginously sloping wooden hut with sliding doors at the back, a window balcony stage right, and a drawbridge-entrance stage left. A single set, of course, allows for continuous action with one scene “fading” into the next, but the element of spectacle is sacrificed to conveying a sense of claustrophobia and grinding, unchanging misery — both certainly aspects of Musorgsky’s “message” in his supreme masterpiece. Played without an interval, it makes for a Rheingold-length evening of almost unrelieved gloom, but that is surely Albery’s intention. This is an unusually level-headed and gimmick-lite account of Musorgsky’s great epic, but it lacks a central focus with the (mis)casting of the guilt-wracked protagonist.

ENO gives us the operatic equivalent of Hamlet without the Prince: a Boris without the Tsar. Peter Rose is a fine singer, with a warm, easily produced, light- timbred bass and immaculate diction, but he looks and sounds like a portly English bank manager in the days before such men were the devils incarnate they are today. For all his imposing physical presence, he lacks the essential terribilità that might make you believe he had ordered the murder of the (real) seven-year-old Tsarevich Dmitri. A Boris should be a cross between Macbeth and Richard III; here we got an admixture of Falstaff and Edward VII. Albery compounds the problem with his limp staging of the Tsar’s climactic descent into madness and demise. Frankly, it’s a big let-down.

The supporting cast includes a few very good singers — Brindley Sherratt’s Pimen, Robert Murray’s plangently sung Yurodivy, Sophie Bevan’s promising Tsarevna — but Jonathan Veira’s Varlaam, Gregory Turay’s False Dmitri, John Graham-Hall’s grey-sounding Shuisky, Anna Grevelius’s Fyodor and David Stephenson’s Shchelkalov all sound undersung.

The best reasons for going are the thrilling choral singing and the dark, grainy sounds Edward Gardner conjures from the fine ENO orchestra. If Gardner sounds occasionally too impatient, he is young and new to this opera, but he is already getting to grips with the epic sweep of Musorgsky’s masterpiece. At the end of the evening, the sheer originality and quality of the music sweeps all before it.

Last Sunday — Remembrance Sunday — Antonio Pappano took his Royal Opera forces to the Albert Hall for a commemorative performance of Britten’s great anti-war blockbuster, the War Requiem. It remains arguably Britten’s most popular large-scale work, although, as Ian Bostridge, the tenor soloist, pointed out in his personal note, it has always had its detractors. Stravinsky’s scorn — “Kleenex at the ready” — has been taken up by self-appointed arbiters of good taste to decry Britten’s moving response to the Latin mass and his ingenious interweaving of Wilfred Owen’s poems. Yet this unique work almost invariably moves in performance, even from the back of the hall, where the musicians inevitably sound distant. Bostridge suffered most: his usually trenchant diction was muffled by its unfriendly acoustic.

Thomas Hampson got more of his words across, and his voice still sounds mellifluous. Best of the soloists was the gleaming, hieratic soprano of Christine Brewer — I can’t believe her music has been better sung. And Pappano was on inspired form, coaxing the ROH chorus and the fanfaring brass of the orchestra to surpass themselves in the Last Trump horrors of Judgment Day.

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