Monday 21 May 2001

Katya Kabanova

by Andrew Clements

Let's get the main complaint out of the way first. The cast for Welsh National Opera's very fine new Katya Kabanova does not contain a single native Czech speaker, and I would guess that the production will not encounter many more in the audience in Cardiff or during its tour.

Yet Janacek's searing study in repression and intolerance is being sung in Czech, distancing 99.9% of those who see it from the terrible events that it portrays. It is either misplaced purism or pure operatic snobbery, and a disservice to a staging whose carefully observed detail and crisply delineated relationships deserve to make maximum emotional impact.

Katie Mitchell's second Janacek production for the Welsh is a far more satisfying affair than her Jenufa for the company two seasons ago. It shares a designer, Vicki Mortimer, with that earlier show, and there is a family resemblance in the cool, uncluttered interiors of the sets, and the downplaying of any sense of the outdoors. But this time everything seems more focused. The mild updating of the action in the costumes (from the 1860s of the original to some time between the wars) is uncontroversial, and the switched locales - centred on a boat station on the banks of the Volga - are perfectly valid. There is still no escaping Katya's tragedy, that of a free spirit mired in the suffocating conventions of middle-class provincial life.

At the centre of everything is Nuccia Focile's Katya. She is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the start, clinging desperately to her husband Tikhon (Peter Hoare) as he prepares to leave on the journey that she knows will bring catastrophe. Her tone is tight, slightly edgy to begin, yet grows steadily in amplitude and warmth through the opera, blossoming in her declarations of love for Boris (Ian Storey), and becoming deeply affecting in her final guilt-ridden monologue.

Her anti-pole is Suzanne Murphy's Kabanicha, the mother-in-law from hell who dotes on her son, feverishly brushing his suit while he is saying his goodbyes to Katya, covertly smoking a cigarette when alone with Dikoj (Alan Fairs), and always cocooning her hypocrisy in glacial calm. Claire Bradshaw's flighty, impulsive Varvara is equally well conceived. Mitchell draws a web of guilt-wracked relationships between all of the protagonists that is totally convincing. Only Carlo Rizzi's conducting is less than ideal. His broad-brush approach lacks the buoyancy and precision the score needs; with everything else so perceptive, it's a shame his contribution is approximate.

New Theatre, Cardiff ****
Until May 30. Box office: 029-2087 8889. Then touring to Southampton, Oxford, Llandudno and Bristol.

Sunday, 27 May 2001

by Nick Kimberley (*)

Where would opera be without its storms? From Gluck through Mozart and Verdi to Britten,bad weather has been a means to raise the emotional temperature, to unleash the musical tumult. So it is in Janácek's Katya Kabanova, premiered in 1921 but based on Ostrovsky's play The Storm, written in Russia 60 years earlier.

The storm that breaks in Act 3 highlights the provincialism of the social world that has Katya in its grip. More importantly, for Janácek if not for Ostrovsky, it embodies the emotional crisis that precipitates Katya's self-destruction. That's what the commotion in the orchestra pit tells us, and the denouement is swift and terrible. The thunder has barely cleared the air before Katya has thrown herself into the Volga.

Janácek set the opera in Ostrovsky's Russia. Katie Mitchell's new production for the Welsh National Opera places it somewhere in Mittel Europa, some time around 1940. This has the benefit of removing the folksiness that can mar the opera: in both Janácek and Ostrovsky, these people are prosperous if insular bourgeois, not peasants. Elsewhere it causes problems. Are Mitchell's characters too glamorous, too worldly, too modern? It's hard to imagine these sophisticates arguing over the existence of electricity, as happens during the storm.

Mitchell emphasises the narrowness that imprisons Katya. She reveals each scene through a kind of camera shutter, and at several moments, including the storm, reduces the stage space drastically. The 'garden' where Katya's adulterous liaison takes place is a nightmare forest, and the love she finds there offers only further imprisonment.

It's a persuasive view. I'm not so sure about Mitchell's presentation of Katya. During the storm, she appears in the virginal nightgown that, in opera, signifies 'madwoman'; and in her final moments, she hallucinates herself out of a tawdry waiting-room into a ballroom with chandeliers. The music, I think, takes things more literally. Mitchell's account internalises Katya's torment, when its causes are real enough to drive any woman to the brink.

Mitchell leaves Nuccia Focile's Katya stranded, or perhaps strait-jacketed, her movement so constricted, her expression so blank, that moments of standard operatic exaggeration, such as crawling after her husband on her knees, seem even more overblown. Focile is a fine singer, and if Janácek's musical prosody sometimes stretches the voice taut, there is also a pained lyricism to wrench the heart.

The production might be better served if the opera was sung in English instead of Czech, but the surtitles do their stand-in job adequately, and the singers work well with their director, so that, whatever dramatic problems there may be, commitment is not one of them. As Kostelnicka, the agent of Katya's destruction, Suzanne Murphy has the tight-lipped hauteur generally required of mothers-in-law, but she also exudes a frosty sensuality that is utterly convincing.

Just as Janácek intended, these two dominate the action, except for what goes in the orchestra pit, where Carlo Rizzi whips up a restless, reckless intensity that some may find too driven. Not me. If details here and there disagree with me, this is a serious and considered production, both musically and dramatically.

Comparing new operas to classics is unfair, of course, but in Katya Janácek tells a complex story in 100 minutes.

(*) Fiona Maddocks is away

Katie Mitchell's new production of Janacek's Katya Kabanova for Welsh National Opera at the New Theatre, Cardiff, revives acutely the thorny question of the necessity for updating. This device is effective, in my opinion, only when it adds something to our perception of the opera, something it rarely achieves.

To transfer this tale of 1850s adultery, guilt, religious bigotry and small-town Russian provincialism to a 1940s upper-middle-class milieu immediately creates libretto and credibility problems - the reference to the nightwatchman for example - while the nouveau-riche merchant Dikoj's ignorance of lightning-conductors and electricity becomes ridiculous.

Also, the Kabanicha, that dragon of a mother-in-law who terrorises her family, is much less formidable when portrayed (subtly) by Suzanne Murphy as a smartly dressed woman who could easily be the bossy chief executive of a successful City firm. Nor is there any suggestion here, as there has been in some productions, of a kinky sexual relationship with Dikoj. Their mutually shared vice is smoking, and she puffs away at an open window so that no trace of smoke will linger!

Locations are varied, too. Mitchell and her designer Vicki Mortimer open the opera in a riverside boat station, a cafe where the churchgoers drop in for a coffee after the service. They end it in a boathouse waiting-room, almost suggesting a railway waiting-room with hints of Anna Karenina and even of Tolstoy's own end.

Just as in her WNO Jenufa, Mitchell ended with a sentimental tableau of a released Kostelnicka, so here she has Katya and her lover Boris dream-waltzing in the waiting-room before they part and Katya runs out to her death in the Volga.

It is at that point that Mitchell shows she has done her homework. The time-span Janacek allows between Katya throwing herself into the river and the recovery of her body always seems too short for credibility - surely she could be resuscitated?

But Ostrovsky's play The Storm, on which Janacek based his libretto, makes it clear that Katya dies because she strikes her head on a submerged object. Sure enough, the dead Katya in this production has a bloody gash on her head.

It is a tribute to the overwhelming power of Janacek's music that Mitchell's interventions, which ordinarily one might have bitterly resented, did not alienate one's sympathies - although I could not help reflecting how much bigger a triumph she might have had by keeping to Janacek's original period and place. But a triumph it is none the less.

This is Carlo Rizzi's swansong as music director of the company he has led since 1992 and he has done nothing better. By conducting Janacek he invades territory hallowed, as it were, in Cardiff by Sir Charles Mackerras and Richard Armstrong.

He has a different view of this score, highly dramatic and romantic, fiercely forceful, but somehow retaining most of the music's essential harsh angularity. What emerges - the outcome of Rizzi's Italian nationality - is a Puccinian accent, not inappropriate in reminding us that Janacek's inspiration for Katya was Madama Butterfly.

Similarly, Nuccia Focile as Katya has to contend with memories of Soderstrom, Nancy Gustafson, Elena Prokina and Amanda Roocroft. She belongs to their line and, like them, sings the role in Czech. Her intensity and reined-in lyricism are deeply moving; only momentarily does she lack strength of tone, and she looks wonderful.

The tenors Peter Hoare and Ian Storey sing well as her husband and lover, and Nicholas Sears and Claire Bradshaw are excellent as the other pair of lovers (who go for a midnight swim while Katya and Boris make love). A provocative and ultimately rewarding evening.

Welsh National Opera's new Káta Kabanová (New Theatre, May 19) marked the last production to be launched by the company's departing musical director, Carlo Rizzi, who is leaving after ten successful seasons. A high proportion of his work with the Welsh has been memorable, and this performance (sung in the original Czech) was among his best interpretations, conveying in full the score's powerful emotional surges, its sharp-edged lyricism and the sheer punchiness of its orchestration.

Katie Mitchell, who gave the company an admired Jenufa a couple of years back, directed, with Vicki Mortimer in charge of design and Paule Constable responsible for lighting. The setting was updated to the middle decades of the twentieth century -- an odd move, since the semi-feudal relationships around which the plot is structured would by then have lost their rigidity, to be replaced by different (and arguably worse) social structures. Precisely what were these merchants doing in the Communist period? Nevertheless, the performances she drew from her principals and the detail and cogency of the interaction between them made the drama profoundly involving and immediate.

The settings too were carefully planned to complement the score's finely realized sense of atmosphere, the opening and closing scenes taking place in a realistic boat-station waiting room on the banks of the Volga, the fatal love tryst between Káta and Boris (paired in double duet with the happy-go-lucky affair between Varvara and Kudryás) in a poetically conceived nocturnal garden leading down to the river.

The sixty-five-year-old composer began this opera in response to his unrequited love for the much younger Kamila Stösslová, whose inspiration is apparent in a whole group of pieces from his last decade. He wrote to her that "the chief character ... is a woman soft by nature. A breeze would carry her away, let alone the storm that gathers over her!" No better physical embodiment of the Káta of Janácek's imagination could be found than the slight, darkly pretty Nuccia Focile, whose residence in Wales allows her to grace the company's productions on a regular basis. A considerable actress, she suggested not merely the vulnerability and guilt of the unhappy married woman but a certain incipient instability that portended ill. When Káta describes to Varvara her youthful religious ecstasies in church -- a scene normally played to suggest her inner vision -- Focile's feverish intensity and manic movements implied instead that this was a woman on the edge of the nervous breakdown that duly follows.

Vocally, Focile was undeniably stretched by the assignment. Her most recent appearances with WNO were as Mozart's Susanna, and the full weight of a lyric soprano in a Janácekian context is not consistently hers to command. In this small theater, however, celebrated for its voice-friendly acoustic, and supported by Rizzi's sympathetic baton, all but a handful of phrases went beautifully.

Suzanne Murphy sang Káta's mother-in-law, Kabanicha, one of the most repellent characters in the opera repertoire, but the fact that there were a few boos amid the cheers at her final curtain was testimony to a performance delivered without visual caricature and also without the ugly screaming often resorted to in the role. This was not a monster but a credible control-freak, aptly demonstrated in Murphy's over-attentive brushing-down of her son Tichon's suit as he prepares to leave for Kazan, as in her high-voltage but never rancid singing. Also undertaken without cartooning was Alan Fairs's anti-social bully of a Dikoj.

Singing effectively, Peter Hoare portrayed Tichon as another victim, almost as damaged as his wife, of his mother's domineering personality. (He was practically in tears at the end of the first scene.) Ian Storey sang Boris, a part with more generous opportunities for high-powered lyricism, on which he seized with full-throated enthusiasm. Varvara found an attractive exponent in Claire Bradshaw; Nicholas Sears thoughtfully presented Kudryás, the town intellectual. With carefully rounded portrayals of the smaller parts, and both chorus and orchestra in tip-top form, this was another production that showed the seriousness of approach that marks the work of WNO at its best.