On full beam

What’s the best first opera for a sceptical adult first timer? It’s a favourite topic among opera buffs, and once you get past the assumption that novices need to be spoon-fed familiar tunes, the consensus — slightly surprisingly — often settles on Jenufa. Surprisingly? Well, yes: Janacek still isn’t guaranteed box office (maybe people conflate that spiky Czech name with a mental picture of Eastern bloc bleakness). In fact, this is a piece that can upend every lazy prejudice about the form: a concentrated plot, a concise running time, and no heroes or villains, just believable characters with painfully human failings. And all set to music that never judges, never sentimentalises: simply cuts raw and direct to the heart. Performed even moderately well, it can turn you inside out.

Richard Studer’s new production at Longborough is performed a lot more than just moderately well. Beautiful singing alone isn’t enough for Jenufa, though all four of Longborough’s central quartet delivered moments of soaring radiance as and when plot and character demanded it. You need to glimpse, at least, what Jenufa (Lee Bisset) sees in her loutish fiancé Steva, and Andrew Rees’s tenor is certainly seductive. Just as Gaynor Keeble, as the Kostelnicka, can deliver Valkyrie-like blasts of tone — or screech like a bird of prey. That’s all basic stuff for Jenufa.

Yet one moment among many that struck home in Studer’s production was their exchange in Act 2, as the Kostelnicka pleads with Steva to do the honourable thing by Jenufa and their illegitimate baby. As he squirmed and finally fled, that ingratiating voice of Rees’s curdled and hardened, even as Keeble’s initially steely mezzo softened, sweetened and for one quiet, heart-stopping moment — as Steva’s self-pitying tears actually seemed to unlock the Kostelnicka’s latent empathy — melted.