We know that empty bus shelter. We recognise the bench under a streetlight, the twitch of a curtain from the big bay window, the nuisance youth on his bike who always happens to be there, night and day. We see how refuge can turn to fear, intimacy to entrapment, close-knit community to shame and desolation. All are key to Janáček’s tragedy Kát’a Kabanová (1921), searingly and tenderly present in Richard Jones’s exemplary new production for the Royal Opera, conducted by Edward Gardner making his overdue main stage debut. Updated from pious 19th-century Russian village to godless 1970s suburb, an already shattering work gains yet wider traction and force.
Based on Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Thunderstorm, Kát’a Kabanová is part of the Royal Opera’s ongoing Janáček series, which began last year with From the House of the Dead. Trevor Nunn’s 1994 production of Kát’a – astonishingly the ROH’s first; Janáček’s star has risen rapidly since – had its final revival in 2007. Jones’s staging deserves a similarly long life, and if Gardner, a natural in this repertoire, is conducting, lucky us. Their partnership, first established when Gardner was music director of English National Opera, must be among opera’s most fruitful.
Janáček was 67 when he wrote the opera, confounded by his infatuation with the younger, married Kamila Stösslová. She inhabited his music and his fantasies, a willing muse though probably not a lover. (The more I read about her, the less sympathetic I find her.) We should thank her for inspiring works of raw, near-psychotic passion, including the string quartet “Intimate Letters”, as well as Kát’a, a portrait of suffocated desire and guilt. The American soprano Amanda Majeski, in her Royal Opera House debut, conveyed the character’s nervy confusion in a performance of hypnotic intensity.
That Majeski was able to handle Janáček’s unique “speech melodies” with untroubled ease was a bonus. His way of notating the stresses and intonation of spoken language in often disconnected harmonies, of locking text and music into a single unit, defines his unmistakable sound world. Motifs of just a few notes repeat over and over, battering ear and mind. Melody rises, a half phrase, a line, perhaps with harp adding hopeful sweetness, only to fall away and vanish into a musical abyss. Whereas his earlier masterpiece, Jenufa (1904), is free-flowing in comparison, Kát’a is concise, spare, scorched by the refiner’s fire.
Women beware women. The mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley as Kát’a’s mother-in-law, the prying, moralising Kabanicha, could have stolen the show herself, marvellously dressed in well-cut suit and French-twist wig, just one of many closely observed details in Antony McDonald’s designs (lit by Lucy Carter). Several other British singers contributed to the well-matched ensemble: Andrew Staples (Tichon), Andrew Tortise (Kudrjáš), Clive Bayley (Dikoj) and Dominic Sedwick (Kuligin). Australian mezzo-soprano Emily Edmonds’s vivacious Varvara and Pavel Černoch (the only Czech) as the susceptible but feckless Boris helped us understand the confines of Kát’a’s awful world. It could be anybody’s. Scottish Opera and Opera North also have their own productions this season: try it.
Venerated by fellow pianists, the Romanian Radu Lupu has acquired mythical status. Now in his 70s, he no longer records, shuns interviews and rarely performs in public. The Royal Festival Hall was sold out for his date with the Philharmonia Orchestra to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4, conducted by Paavo Järvi, in a concert that included a soul-baring, virile performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2.
Lupu’s upright chair rather than piano stool, and his lack of showy gesture, are hallmarks. He takes his seat, body relaxed, head tilted back a little, as if submitting to a barber. Instead he’s surrendering, as far as humanly possible, every vestige of self to become a vessel for the music. The solo opening of the concerto, hushed, poetic, sinewy, heralded an account of daring intimacy, dense with risk. Lupu allows nerve-shattering pauses. This has no connection with the missed notes or insecure passagework or, in one instance, a time lapse between soloist and orchestra. He has always played with an improvisatory quality, as if taking aural dictation from the ether. As a younger man, flowing black hair and beard, he seemed like someone from a Russian novel. Now he’s the hermit, frail beyond his years, down from the mountain bearing wisdom. Järvi, upright, like a bandmaster, yet responsive to line and phrase, was a sympathetic accompanist, the orchestra lithe, supple, unfazed by this familiar music’s new adventures.
Where Järvi has an almost military posture, the harpsichordist-academic-conductor John Butt swings, sways and dances like a cheerful bell-ringer. Best known for his small-scale Bach performances with the Dunedin Consort, last week he enthusiastically matched historically informed practice with large symphonic and choral forces. To mark the 90th anniversary of the illustrious BBC Symphony Chorus, the choir took on the challenge of Bach’s B minor Mass. Butt must have first encountered Bach through grand accounts conducted by the likes of Klemperer or Karajan.
Tastes have changed but choirs still want to sing this masterpiece. It would be easy to list aspects that didn’t work: we’re now used to brisker tempos and pinpoint precision. Yet the spirit of the enterprise, the passion of singers and orchestra (BBC Symphony, using modern instruments and with reduced strings), the committed energy of, especially but not only, the Sanctus, resulted in a performance of heart and commitment. Perfection has its place. We value it, but it’s not the only way. Music is a vaster universe, as this week’s concerts so generously showed.
Star ratings (out of five)
Káťa Kabanová ★★★★★
Radu Lupu, Philharmonia/Järvi ★★★★
Bach’s Mass in B minor ★★★
Káťa Kabanová is in rep at the Royal Opera House, London, until 26 February
