Richard Morrison [Times Online, 20 February 2007]
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
In Russia, history tends to repeat itself as tragedy, then farce ó then grand opera. Mussorgskyís Khovanshchina is typical: an epic attempt to dramatise power struggles in late 17th-century Moscow. And cosy they arenít. By Act V all the jostling factions are murdered, exiled or have set themselves on fire (the opera ends with a macabre mass-immolation), thanks to the machinations of Peter the Great, who never appears ó Tsarist convention dictating that you couldnít portray a Romanov on stage.