When Dmitri Shostakovich decided to write a series of operas about the plight of women, his first choice (actually, for political reasons, the first and last of the set) was an eccentric one. Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is not madly sympathetic to its awful anti-heroine, a serial murderer whose crimes stem from sexual frustration – a tormenting addition to the standard curse of Russian life, tedium or skuka, familiar from Turgenev and Chekhov.The composer wagered his talent on trying to win our sympathy for Katerina Ismailova, the Lady M of the title: victim of domestic tyranny, rebel against existential oppression, a woman demanding to free her sexuality. Still in his twenties, he chose an interesting medium, too: a gleefully brash, absu