Stripped to its bare essentials, Janáček’s first significant stage work could be taken for the storyline of the most lurid soap opera. In the analysis of a puzzled conversation overheard during the interval: “So she gets married to the one who slashes her face, not the alcoholic who left her pregnant?” Indeed she does – though not before her stepmother has murdered the baby.
The challenge for any staging is to present these events as harrowing without becoming unduly histrionic; a balance which Tom Cairns’s much travelled 20-year-old Opera North production only partially achieves. Cairns’s direction and design epitomise an era in which skewed angles and acidic lighting were considered de rigueur, and conceives of Moravian village life as an austere existence in which the folk love in triangles and live in asymmetric polygons. It also means that Jenůfa’s troubled dream of being suffocated by rocks is accompanied by the silhouette of a large boulder bearing down on her, which pushes crushing symbolism to its furthest extent.
Vocally, however, this revival is in great shape, with an impressive, A-list cast. Ylva Kihlberg made a spectacular Opera North debut in the Makropolus Case, and proves herself to be the ideal Janáček soprano. Her Jenůfa is lithe, loud but never shrill, while her poetic, sculptural profile seems to make her the living equivalent of the religious icons crowding Jenůfa’s foster mother’s table.
It’s notable that both Susan Bickley and Ed Lyon, as the Kostelnička and Steva, established their careers as early music specialists, and take advantage of the close relationship between Janáček’s speech-melody and the expressive inflection of baroque recitative. But it is David Butt Philip, making his company debut as Laca, who provides the pleasantest surprise: a young baritone-turned-tenor whose dark tone and intense presence suggest a significant future lies ahead.
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