The sun rises over the Moscow River; birdsong flutters out amid shimmering strings, a folky melody winds through a musical fabric of light and air. The Kremlin guards wake, joshingly recall their atrocities of the previous night, and the human world shatters the calm beauty of the natural one.One of the great things about Modest Mussorgsky’s 1880 opera is that it isn’t as simple as that. This unwieldy, discursive, nihilistic, transcendent piece is the equivalent of a Dostoevsky novel and shares the same obsessions. Mussorgsky takes as his text the vicious squabbles of the late seventeenth century, when warlords jostled for power during a confused interregnum. Modernisers fought with old-Russia fanatics, and reactionary Orthodox schismatics followed end-of-days priests preachin