One in a thousand

Katya Kabanova
Opera Holland Park

The Mask of Orpheus, Act II
Proms

I took yet another amazed Londoner to the Opera Holland Park production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova — he was amazed not only by the pleasant comfort of the place, but also by the standard of the performance, which would have been a credit to any opera house in the world. Why are opera-goers so uninquisitive? It’s an inevitable but useless question. It isn’t that one sees empty seats at OHP, but the audience strikes me as being, to a large extent, composed of people who wouldn’t normally go to opera, but rather are having an evening out. ‘Real’ opera-lovers still tend to think that it is a place to condescend to, or to go to for exotic repertoire; and almost no one I’ve taken has gone again under their own steam. But then most people are depressing.

This Katya, directed by Olivia Fuchs, was extremely strongly cast, with Anne Sophie Duprels in the title role giving a performance of such overwhelming generosity and intensity that I’m inclined to say I have never experienced so fine a reading of the part — but then I say that almost every time I see the opera. No one will be more moving than Susan Chilcott, but Duprels is of that calibre. Unlike some Katyas, she never seems a whinger, or a mere victim. She knows she is doing wrong in having an affair, but — this is where Janacek is on his favourite territory — she knows that the wrong she is doing is the only way in which she can fulfil herself. She doesn’t have the nerve or the capacity to see that the vile Kabanicha and all that she stands for are merely suffocating, but in the face of certain punishment she goes ahead and has her affair, night after night, with the insipid Boris, whose only saving grace is that he is prepared to help her commit adultery.