Janacek's pain

Spectator, The, Mar 15, 2003 by Tanner, Michael

Opera

Jenufa; Cav and Pag Welsh National Opera Susanna Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Janacek's operas are suffused with a glowing pessimism. He doesn't ask us, absurdly, to think that everything is good, even that everything that lives is good. Most of his characters are no better than they should be, many are venal and vile. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world as he sees it, if we are to rely on his choice of operatic subjects, is a terrible place. He clearly adored young women, including ones that take the form of a vixen or have retained their youth only by imbibing an elixir for over 300 years; but they suffer appallingly, and end in death or at best an uncertain future. Yet the music, pulsing unstoppably and welling up in the most glorious colours, manages the paradox of both intensifying the characters' sufferings and making them seem the expression of a capacity for living which means that at any moment they might be as happy as they usually are wretched.

A world imagined by Janacek is frightful in all kinds of ways, but dignity and the possibility of more abundant life is never denied. If wonder is the heart of a religious attitude, then Janacek is passionately religious; but in no other way.

Jenufa remains, probably will remain, his most popular opera because it is a kind of bridge between more familiar attitudes and the outlandish world view that his fully mature operas and other works embrace and embody. Apart from the folkish, Smetana-like elements in the outer acts, and some vestigial arias and conventional vocal lines, most of the music is instantly recognisable as Janacek, though it is rarely as jagged and seemingly disjointed as in the operas he wrote later. The development in his aesthetic of opera is, as with all the greatest composers in the genre, at the same time the exploration of his own understanding of life, one which was so radical that he needed later on to take ever more recalcitrant subjects.

Jenufa has a fairly traditional plot, though one which is more uncompromisingly, unglamorously grim, in a realistic setting, than that of any previous operatic masterpiece. The first great thing about Welsh National Opera's production, now revived, is that the naturalism the opera demands is for once fully honoured, both in setting and in acting. This is an opera of which I can't remember a really disappointing account, but none other has exposed so completely the energy with which the piece is charged. Not even Charles Mackerras has ever given so searing a reading of the score, and one which flows - if that's the word - in so inevitable a way that the final transition passage, after the infanticide Kostelnicka is led away, to the heart-easing but also heart-breaking music to which Jenufa and Laca finally stop causing one another pain, is made to emerge necessarily from what precedes it, as everything throughout the score is.

This is one of the most subtle and moving pieces of conducting I have ever heard. Fortunately the orchestra does it all justice, as do the singers, especially the women. The men - Nigel Robson as Laca, Peter Wedd as Steva - are probably perfectly satisfactory, but it is only in From the House of the Dead that Janacek wrote music that is grateful for men to sing, and to achieve that he had to write an opera with no women in it. However, the women in this performance are all quite marvellous. Susan Chilcott is the most moving of Jenufas, all the more vulnerable because there is so much of her personality to hurt. Suzanne Murphy is a more rounded Kostelnicka than, say, Anja Silja, whose monolithic interpretation of the part has burned itself into our consciousness, but who was harder to feel with. Go.

I'm glad I saw Cav and Pag the previous evening, for their pretence to be portrayals of something called real life is conclusively placed by the implacable Janacek. Not that there is anything missing in WNO's production of them, either - and at least we get both, as we shan't at the Royal Opera later in the season. Tugan Sokhiev conducts with idiomatic fervour, but never underlines anything, nor attempts vainly to refine the unrefinable. Dennis O'Neill is both Turiddu and Canio, and thrilling as both. Is there any other tenor today who is so convincing in these parts? - he even looks rather like Caruso. Katja Lytting is the Santuzza of my dreams, or would be if I dreamt of Cav. And Jonathan Summers's Alfio is a superb study in cold vengefulness. These gifted performers must be grateful to Mascagni for giving them the opportunity to make coarse feelings into characters. Pag is a vastly more proficient work, and with Nuccia Focile's highly seducable Nedda and Leigh Melrose's sexy Silvio, an advert out of Men's Health, this has all the required machismo and heated elements for a crime passionel, an unusually convincing one.

Too little space to do justice to Handel's oratorio Susanna, as performed at the Guildhall School. I saw the first cast in this staged version, plausibly set in a Puritan community. One of Handel's most inspired scores, it was powerfully affecting thanks to the wonderful singing and acting in the title role of Alexandra Rigazzi-Tarling. If she can think of a more memorable name, she is destined for stardom, and soon. The rest of the cast ranged from the good to the wretched, and the conducting was nothing to write home about. Even so, a stirring evening in the kind of week that makes an opera critic's life enviable.