The Adventures of Mr Broucek
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
Prima Donna
Sadler’s Wells
There is no composer to whose works my reactions fluctuate so much as Janacek. I don’t mean the various compositions in his output, I mean specific works on different occasions. When I saw a concert performance of his comic opera The Adventures of Mr Broucek at the Barbican in 2007, conducted by Jiri Belohlavek, I became an instant, passionate convert to a piece that I had previously thought was mostly a dismal flop. And I felt the same when the CDs of that performance were issued. Then, last October, when it was staged in English by Opera North in a co-production with Scottish Opera, directed by John Fulljames and conducted by Martin André, I admired the commitment of the endeavour, but couldn’t find much interest in the work.
When I saw the production this month at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, the effect was strikingly different from that in the Grand Theatre in Leeds. There I had seen it from the stalls, and the stage, a small one, had seemed impossibly cluttered, the action often unintelligible. In Edinburgh I was in the dress circle, and the stage is very broad and quite deep, so that the action was agreeably sorted out, and many visual effects that had gone for nothing in Leeds were — in this tale of visiting the Moon and 14th-century Prague — impressive, though there is little that is realistic in the designs; the opera is vaguely set, the excursions apart, in Prague in 1968. That particular piece of updating seems to be more gratuitous than most. There were surtitles, too, which I found a great help, not having been able to hear much of the dialogue in Leeds.
And yet …I was bewildered by the extent of my disappointment, and not inclined to put it down to inadequacies of the performance: the singers are a remarkable, gifted collection who can all act well, and André conducted the large, excellent orchestra with conviction. There was never any doubt about who the composer was, with fanfares in the strangest places, odd vocal phrases repeated like nervous tics, and the energetic, tense and disjoint idiom just as characteristic as the other operas of Janacek’s maturity.
Should he have chosen this subject, though? More precisely, was he mistaken in writing a satire, and carrying on at such length? When he has great tragic subjects he is pithy, and the results are devastating, with few equals in the whole operatic repertoire. In Broucek he sprawls, and in both the dream sequences one wonders if he is carrying on in the hope of finding something worth saying. Part of the trouble springs, I think, from the fact that the central figure of fun was supposed to be the character after whom the opera is named, but in the event he turns up in two worlds where the inhabitants are ridiculous; on the Moon because they are aesthetes who smell flowers rather than eat sausages, in Prague because they are windy sectarians, of the kind far more effectively dealt with in The Life of Brian. Broucek’s lustfulness, his hearty appetite and cowardly attempts at valour strike one as healthy reactions to what he finds, so the satire misfires. John Graham-Hall, a suit clutching his briefcase, makes him into a parody of bureaucracy rather than a Schwejk, which is surely what is intended. The artist Mazal, meant to be unsympathetic, is so powerfully performed by Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts that he wins our interest. So does his beloved Malinka, certainly as portrayed by the enchanting Anne Sophie Duprels. There is no weak link in the cast — in fact, it was painful to see some wonderful performers with almost nothing to do. But this opera is a mess, from which one retains gorgeous passages, and forgets the musical waffle — the last thing one would normally accuse Janacek of.
Rufus Wainwright’s first opera, Prima Donna, has had a mixed reception. It is a competently constructed piece, I suppose, but its idiom is so redolent of Italian opera in the first few years of the 20th century, and its subject, broadly speaking Callas trying to pull herself together to make a comeback, so worked over that the effect is sticky, despite the efforts of a strong cast. There is the paradox, too, of a very good singer, Janice Kelly, having to sing at length about how her voice has completely gone. Many first operas suffer from a lack of pace; I left in the interval, unable to take any more of an amble through such familiar-sounding territory. But maybe for anyone coming to opera for the first time it would make an agreeably luvvie effect.
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