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Friday 9 January 2009

Inspiration in a factory

King Idomeneo
Birmingham

Osud
Royal Albert Hall

Janacek’s obsessions, with innocent exploitable young women, with dreadful, lunatic older imperious ones, and with bewildered, dithering men stuck between the two, here have both their most complicated, let’s-try-to-be-fair-all-round outing, and are shown to be finally unconquerable. The beautiful background of normality and quotidian flirting and quarrelling, figured in the many choral interjections, mainly serve to make at least some aspects of the central triangle more harrowing, though in the end the composer-figure, Janacek’s one indulgence in autobiography in his art, is too pathetic to have bestowed on him the transfiguringly ecstatic music that the others are all awarded. He is punished with a viciously hard tessitura, which Stefan Margita coped with better than Janacek deserved. Amanda Roocroft was adorable, on old form, as the wretched Mila, and Plowright, omissions apart, spectacularly unhinged and forceful as the Mother. All the innumerable minor roles were perfect. This, or a performance based on it, should be issued as a recording.

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