Kat’a Kabanova
Glyndebourne Festival Theatre, Sussex

SOMEWHAT appropriately in these pandemic times, Leos Janacek’s Kat’a Kabanova centres around the conflict of a liberating outdoors and a repressive indoors. Adapted from Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1859 play The Storm, a hallmark of Russian realist theatre,  it is a pointed criticism of the merchant class.

Janacek’s elegantly romantic yet strikingly modern compositional style excels at conveying the inner conflicts of the characters, while sonically illustrating the town of Kalinov on the Volga river. Despite Moravian-born Janacek’s pan-Slavist ambitions, Kat’a Kabanova has a universal relatability — a loveless marriage, infidelity, family pressures, mental ill-health, abuse and suicide are all in the narrative mix.

Yet Janacek conjures an uplifting joie de vivre in the musical landscape of the opera. The content is dark but there’s a jovial mood after the final act  — life is strenuous and we are all at the mercy of caprice yet there is a beauty in our complexities.

Robin Ticciati, with what is evidently a deep understanding of Janacek’s music, conducts a reduced orchestra wonderfully and maintains a dramatic yet playful energy that does justice to numerous cathartic moments.

The opera’s director Damiano Michieletto has turned contention and controversy into a badge of honour and his deconstructivist approach might on the surface seem a good fit for a work like Kat’a Kabanova with its deep, philosophical content.

Thus Paolo Fantin’s set  — white, sterile and clinical — is removed from the realism of its original rustic Russian setting and brings to mind Le Corbusier’s  modernist icon Villa Savoye, built the same decade the opera was composed. It’s as if Michiletto is evoking ghosts from the pan-European depression of the 1920s.

At first glance, the symbolism smacks of heavy-handed cliche — the stage is filled with  bird cages and  dancers appear as angels surrounded by tall white walls, the latter used in emotive, albeit predictable, ways.

The angel dancers introduce metaphysical undertones, a brilliant touch, with their presence highlighting the protagonist’s mental state and the sense that hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, is “other people.”

Right before the interval, the walls began to move, closing in on Kat’a and the device serves the music and the existential angst of the tragic heroine’s dilemma. When Kat’a commits suicide in the  final moments, the bird cages plummet to the floor.

The singing is universally excellent, with Katerina Knezikova in the title role making a powerful Glyndebourne debut and winning well-deserved standing ovations.

But the high-modernist approach for this realist opera mars the substance of the relationships between the characters and the potential that the libretto offers to present a lived-in, breathing world.

Janacek wanted strong actors to sing the roles and unfortunately, in this production, there was too much of the standard opera cliche of singing out to the audience rather than performers directly engaging with or being directly affected by each other in the moment.

The opera is a reminder of how brilliantly Janacek explored interpersonal relationships yet here the characters’ interactions seem primarily analogous and symbolic. There’s no sense of a  conversation between the protagonists, which misses out on what makes Janacek’s vocal writing so innovative  — he was even known to keep a notepad  to hand, jotting down the speech patterns of overheard passers-by.

In particular, the tyrants Kabanicha and Savel are presented as one-dimensional baddies but there’s no indciation of why they are so evil or a sense or how they change when interacting with each other.

Runs until June 19, box office: glyndebourne.com