Tough Satire

Just a few weeks ago, in Rome's Opera House, a harsh satire of the communist system was performed -- Dmitry Shostakovich's The Nose in a Zurich Opera production [Swift and Corrosive, 3 February 2013]. Now La Scala has an equally tough satire by a modern composer, Alexander Raskatov, based on the now well-known 1925 Mikhail Bulgakov novel Soba 'e serdce ('A Dog's Heart'). The book was forbidden in the USSR until 1987 but circulated widely in the Western world. A Dog's Heart is co-produced with the Dutch Opera House in Amsterdam and the British English National Opera...