Boris Christoff - Mussorgsky - Boris Godunov (2015)

This release comes as quite a surprise. Although John Lucas in his 1993 biography of Sir Reginald Goodall refers in a footnote to the existence of a BBC radio recording of the performance of Boris Godunov given at the Royal Opera Covent Garden on 10 June 1961 under Goodall’s baton, he does not list it in his discography of the conductor’s work in the same volume. It was in the event — with the exception of a single performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel — the last conducting engagement undertaken by Goodall at Covent Garden for ten years. When he next appeared in the pit at the Royal Opera to conduct Parsifal – a BBC recording of one of those performances has already emerged on CD – he had already established his reputation as a Wagnerian. But he had always enjoyed critical approval for his interpretation of Boris, and the appearance of another opera in the sparse representation of Goodall on disc is to be wholeheartedly welcomed.

In fact John Lucas reports that Goodall preferred the more sparkly and ‘cleaned-up’ version of the score by Rimsky-Korsakov to Mussorgsky’s original, but this recording of the unadulterated score has additional advantages in providing us with the chance to hear Boris Christoff and John Lanigan in the original score – when they came to record their roles commercially for EMI the Rimsky edition was employed. Not that what we have here exactly corresponds to anything that Mussorgsky would have expected. We are given the original (unperformed) 1869 version, with some of the cuts made for the first stage performance in 1874 (such as the end of the first scene of the Prologue, and the discussion between the boyars which precedes the death scene) and the revised Second Act from that edition. We are also given a heavily abridged version of the 1874 Polish scenes — the role of Rangoni is completely excised, and the second scene is represented only from the Polonaise onwards. The final Kromy Forest scene that Mussorgsky added in 1874 to substitute for the St Basil’s confrontation between Boris and the Simpleton is missing in its entirety. Oddly enough a review from The Times included in the booklet note refers specifically to the fact that the Kromy Forest scene was given at the performance on 2 June*, although the same review also mentions the often-omitted second part of Pimen’s 1869 narration describing the murder of Dimitri at Uglich and Feodor’s description of the chiming clock both of which are retained in this later performance.

This recording, we are told, derives from a tape made by an anonymous collector presumably from the BBC broadcast. It is therefore a different source to the tape preserved in the British Library to which Lucas makes passing reference in his biography. We are told that the sound is a considerable improvement both on that and another pirate copy which has been in circulation over the years. Andrew Rose has subjected the original to further re-mastering to eliminate “dropout and the like”, and by excising the opening BBC announcements before each Act has managed to squeeze what is left of the score onto two CDs. Incidentally the division into ‘Acts’ does not correspond to any of Mussorgsky’s or Rimsky’s actual descriptions, but presumably simply reflects where Covent Garden inserted its intervals at that time.