Janáček
David Nice
Janáček described his nature-versus-humanity fable The Cunning Little Vixen as “a merry thing with a sad end”. In which case, the even stranger Makropulos Case is a chattery legal mystery with a transcendent end as the 337-year-old (437 in this update) protagonist decides life only has meaning within its natural span and rejects the formula she's come for.You don't feel the transcendence from director Katie Mitchell, who complicates an already wordy text with a whole new subplot where minor character Krista falls in love with Emilia Marty.Although the original play was also written by a Read more ...
Robert Beale
Dennis Russell Davies and his musicians from the Czech Republic’s second city began a UK tour last night with an enterprising programme and a large and appreciative audience in Manchester.Freddy Kempf as piano soloist was an undoubted part of the attraction, but he was not there to play a conventional concerto but to join the bouncing Czechs in their love of jazz idioms.The Brno Philharmonic could hardly omit Janáček from their concert, as theirs is the city in which he spent most of his career, but it was a brief acknowledgment in the form of four out of six of his Lachian Dances – an early Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Even more perhaps than straight theatre, opera seems to draw attention to the meaning behind what may on the face of it appear a simple story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the story, with all its realistic impedimenta, can be simply ignored or reconfigured, as has alas too often been the case.In this 2021 production of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova, Damiano Michieletto took a middle road in the debate. He abandoned all suggestion of locale: no river Volga, no house, no garden, practically no weather, everything played in a uniform quasi-interior (designer Paolo Fantin) framed only by blank Read more ...
David Nice
Who doesn’t love the quirky, passionate and humanitarian genius of Leoš Janáček? All of it, these days. Since Charles Mackerras introduced the UK to a then-unknown, even the less familiar operas have had plenty of exposure. Simon Rattle was among the champions, giving an early concert performance (the UK premiere, I think) of the astonishing Osud (Fate). Now he's performing and recording them all with the London Symphony Orchestra.The Adventures of Mr Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century, the full title promising its true wackiness, has had two ENO productions, one at Grange Park Opera Read more ...
David Nice
This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.From the opening rattle of Janáček's rural mill-wheel – the xylophone used in the first production apparently imported from Czechia, such is his sense of detail – via the strings which flame around the Kostelnička’s terrifying decision to give her stepdaughter a better life by drowning the girl’s baby, to the affirmative brass of the great final scene, Read more ...
David Nice
Face scarred, baby murdered – both crimes committed by those closest to her – village girl Jenůfa rises again with extraordinary strength of will. Of all affirmative endings in opera, Janáček’s has to be the most moving, and all the more so in this revival of David Alden’s clear and perceptive production as Jennifer Davis uses the power behind her beautiful lyric soprano to go the extra mile, as she always does.The central battle of female energies is as strong as ever I’ve seen it, even if the balance is slightly shifted. Susan Bullock, in the role of Jenůfa’s stepmother or Kostelnička ( Read more ...
David Nice
An inexhaustible masterpiece shows different facets with each new interpretation. I’d thought of Jenůfa, Janáček's searing tale of Moravian village life based on a great play by a pioneering woman (Gabriela Preissová), as an open razor rushing through the world, cutting left and right. Simon Rattle presented instead an opulent bouquet, one slowly purged of the poisonous blooms within it.Last year’s concert performance of Káťa Kabanová offered a more obvious candidate for luminous lyricism. Jenůfa, an earlier work not without problems, rather than great originalities, of orchestration, needed Read more ...
David Nice
Amanda Majeski pushed the boundaries as Janáček's tormented heroine for director Richard Jones at the Royal Opera. Here there were confines – no “concert staging” this, but a laissez-faire affair with scores and music stands, occasionally obscuring the stage directions – but she still conveyed the essence in front of Simon Rattle’s throbbing, luminous London Symphony Orchestra and flanked by other cast members of uniform excellence.Not for Majeski the composer’s definition of Russian playwright Ostrovsky’s Katya – the opera is performed in Czech, of course, but the LSO gives the Russian Read more ...
David Nice
“Visionary,” I’m told, is a clichéd word these days. But so long as you don’t fling it about too freely, it’s apt: for me, there are only two visionary directors working in opera right now. One is our own Richard Jones – though even he can get it wrong occasionally – and non-Czechs probably won’t know much about the other as yet.Jiří Heřman, for seven years the Artistic Director of the National Theatre Brno’s Janáček Opera, whose new production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead in an unprecedented yoking with the Glagolitic Mass I was there in to see, along with a revival of his 2020 Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Now for something completely different. The Excursions of Mr Brouček is Leos Janáček’s least typical opera and is rarely performed. Among his tragic tales such as Jenufa and Kat’a Kabanova, the charm of The Cunning Little Vixen and the strangely heart-twisting The Makropoulos Case, the Czech composer's biting satire – in which the time-travelling anti-hero is chiefly "blotto" – faces an uphill struggle for a look-in.Back in the English National Opera "powerhouse" days in the distant 1990s, the director David Pountney gave it a comparatively poetic staging, full of ballet and balloons (if I Read more ...
David Nice
One of the world’s top five orchestras – sorry, but I locate them all in continental Europe – played on the second night of its London visit to a half-empty Barbican Hall. Half-full, rather, attentive and ecstatic. As for the much-criticised venue, which I’ve always been able to live with, playing as fine as this shows that you don’t need a state-of-the-art auditorium to make the most beautiful sounds.Under the masterly hands of Semyon Bychkov, there were depths and perspectives in defiance of the acoustics. They were there right at the start in the noblest possible performance of the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If like me you regard the ending of Janáček’s Jenůfa as one of the most moving scenes in all opera, you might care to consider how it would be possible to deflate it in spite of the best singing imaginable. You might, for instance, bring up a back curtain revealing a beautiful garden three or four years on with a sweet little boy gambolling through it, the future product, presumably, of Laca and Jenůfa’s love as opposed to the frozen product of hers and Laca’s half brother Števa’s, recently discovered under the river ice.No surely: too kitsch by half! But that is precisely what happens in the Read more ...