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.
Janacek makes his heroine’s fate even crueller than it need be by having only two other characters on her side, the merrily superficial Varvara and Kudrjas. Without a thought in their heads, they mate and elope to Moscow, leaving Katya to her fate. Everyone else is just appalling, with the Kabanicha off the scale, a figure for whom Janacek can’t be bothered even to write music to bring her to life. Anne Mason did all that can be done with this wretched part. And the variously unsympathetic men were the strongest collection I’ve heard, with Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts outstanding as Tichon, Katya’s cringing husband.
The set was excellent, a cage-like room for the Kabanov house, some suggestive floating objects for outside, enough to evoke the atmosphere; the costumes similarly apposite. The only thing I would criticise was the stylised behaviour of the chorus, who appeared unnecessarily often, as if this were Peter Grimes, and went in for incongruous hand-signalling. I wondered whether Peter Sellars had been given the chance to interfere. The conducting by Stuart Stratford was gloriously uninhibited, ferocious and with that kind of acrid tenderness of which Janacek is the sole master. This was an operatic evening in a thousand.
Harrison Birtwistle’s 75th birthday is properly being celebrated in extenso at the Proms, but a good deal less than justice was done to what may be his masterpiece, The Mask of Time, by semi-staging Act II of it, after a lacklustre first part of the programme. Commentators insisted, rightly, that it is a work that involves singing, dancing, acting, staging, and they were proved all too right. That, of course, was what it was magnificently given in 1986 at ENO, but strangely that heroic and triumphant effort has never been repeated. Yet Messiaen’s St François d’Assise, a comparably demanding work, and not obviously a greater one, has been performed many times, including at last year’s Proms — in full. Peter Zinovieff’s libretto almost grounds the Mask before it starts, yet when staged we were greatly impressed as well as baffled. The simultaneous presentation of different versions of the Orpheus–Euridice story, with the dense textures of Birtwistle’s score, made an impact which would have encouraged attendance at further productions had there been any — or a revival. But at the Albert Hall it seemed more confusing, because several of the crucial elements — dancing, almost any acting, miming — were eliminated, and we only heard the orchestra and saw the singers with the ugly microphones wrapped round their heads, some of them making more convincing gestures than others — Christine Rice as usual provided a lesson in identification with her role. One needs time to sink oneself in Birtwistle’s highly personal idiom. Here, though the act is about an hour long, by the time one was more or less on its wavelength it was coming to an end.
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