Jarring Janacek

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.