Rosie Aldridge Makes Katerina Debut in Stuttgart's New Lady Macbeth

Rosie Aldridge stars as Katerina in a new production of Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" opening this week at the Staatsoper Stuttgart. It's her fourth role debut at the house, and she doesn't leave the stage once all evening.

Aldridge's repertoire runs from Wagner, Janáček and Stravinsky to Sondheim and Turnage. She spoke to OperaWire ahead of the premiere.

What draws her to Katerina?

"Roles like this don't come along very often," Aldridge said. "Katerina is passionate, sensual, lonely, dangerous, vulnerable and capable of terrible violence... to be entrusted with the dramatic engine of an entire evening – to play someone neither good nor bad, but contradictory and completely three-dimensional – is a huge privilege."

She hears Janáček in the score's treatment of text and rhythm, and increasingly Judith in Bartók's "Bluebeard's Castle" — concentrated, psychologically active writing, though Katerina travels a broader musical journey.

Her Wagner has been useful. "I'm also incredibly glad that I have sung Kundry," she said of the "Parsifal" role. "With Kundry I learnt that you have to be fearless – to trust the extremes of the writing and commit to them completely. That has certainly been one of the keys to unlocking Katerina musically."

How demanding is the role?

"There is an extraordinary energy in this opera," she said. "If you manage to tap into it, it carries you – perhaps even forces you along, like a kind of jet plane."

In Ulrike Schwab's production she appears in every scene. She has lived with the character and its music for two years, and says the key to singing Katerina is approaching her through drama and emotion rather than vocal mechanics.

Why Stuttgart?

Her Stuttgart debuts stack up neatly: her first Kundry in "Parsifal," Kostelnička in "Jenůfa" and the Witch in "Hänsel und Gretel." Katerina joins the list.

The conductor matters too. "I would trust our conductor Nicholas Carter with my life," she said. The two recently collaborated on Reimann's "Lear" with director Barrie Kosky in Berlin, and those performances overlapped with the first two weeks of Stuttgart rehearsals. This production is also Carter's first as Music Director in Stuttgart.

Is Katerina a villain?

Aldridge rejects the label outright. "I find the notion of her as a 'villain' sexist and old-fashioned," she said. "It reduces a remarkable character to her terrible actions while ignoring everything that has brought her to that point."

She traces the perception to "centuries of male-dominated tradition that has taught us how to judge such women," and says she's more interested in what choices were actually available to Katerina. By the end of the performance, she wants the audience to have retained compassion for her.

The role came about through her agent, Oliver Clarke, and Boris Ignatov, Stuttgart's casting director, who planned the debut together. "With roles like this you can only ever hope that somebody will see that possibility in you and give you the chance," she said.

Listeners can hear more of Aldridge on "Miss Julie" (Chandos) and in a Rossini excerpt. With Schwab staging, Carter conducting and Aldridge never offstage, Stuttgart is betting the whole evening on one voice.