Opera
Polar exploration
Michael Tanner
Katya Kabanova Opera North Imeneo Cambridge Handel Opera Group
Opera North’s new production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova is the most moving I have seen, though it is not the best produced, best sung or most consistently cast. There are two things that make it indispensable to a lover of this wonderful work: the first is the brilliant, perceptive and thought-provoking essays in the programme by Stuart Leeks and, especially, David Nice. The second is the overpoweringly penetrating conducting of Richard Farnes, who shows with every opera he conducts that he is as versatile and deep a conductor as any alive today.
What Farnes realises about Katya is that it is the opera in which the two poles of Janacek’s vision, pitiless bleakness at one extreme and consuming warmth at the other, are juxtaposed in the starkest terms, that no compromise between them is reached or possible, and that bleakness has the last word. The fundamental paradox of all this composer’s art is that passages of manic exultation and desperate lyricism leave us with a feeling of affirmation, but that he knows that that feeling is one maintained in spite of ... everything. He wasn’t such a fool as to think that life or people are fundamentally good or decent; but he knew that though the world gives every reason for despair, that state itself is so profitless and pointless that the pride of living and maintaining a core of joyfulness is the one thing that makes existence tolerable. That is shown in each of the great quartet of operas, Katya, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropoulos Case and From the House of the Dead.
But it’s Katya which is the most moving, because the heroine is adorable, knows that there must be more to life than a wretched marriage dominated by her unloved husband’s loathsome mother Kabanicha, finds out what more there is, in the form of a passionate and extremely brief affair with Boris, the son of the gruesome and grotesque merchant Dikoy, and therefore has to kill herself, since Kabanicha and Dikoy set the tone of society. This painful understanding dictates the orchestral idiom, on which the speech of the characters floats. It is an idiom of jagged or caressing lines, orchestrated and harmonised harshly or benignly. Katya’s entry, explicitly modelled on Janacek’s beloved Madam Butterfly’s, is juxtaposed not with the virile superficiality of a Pinkerton, but with the prosy tightness of her husband Tichon and his mother Since the sympathetic characters’ feelings are so much in excess of their capacity to put them into words, the orchestra has to do that job for them. In Katya there is much of Janacek’s most radiant music, but its ending is the chilling formality of Kabanicha’s thanking the townspeople for their kindness in retrieving Katya’s body from the river in which she has just drowned herself. The only people with warm hearts who are left, the loving pair Varvara and Kudryash, leave for Moscow.
If one doesn’t leave Katya numbed with misery it has been a failure. Farnes, with his intensity, both of heat and cold, wonderfully realised by Opera North’s orchestra, brought all this home. Giselle Allen’s Katya is moving but slightly lacking in dramatic range. The rest of the cast is at least adequate, with the odd exception of Kabanicha: the most striking singing actress on the stage, Sally Burgess, is here wholly miscast. She is so exuberant a performer, such a natural purveyor of liveliness, that the withered soul of Kabanicha is quite out of her range almost to her credit, one is inclined to feel. Burgess suppresses everything she normally does, but can’t find anything else, so Kabanicha becomes, instead of a black hole, a mere hole. In Hildegard Bechtler’s sets there is a simple contrast between subdued nature and dark, oppressive culture. Tim Albery’s production is characteristically lucid. Both are enough to let the drama make its effect, unimpeded.
The Cambridge Handel Opera Group’s biennial production this year was Imeneo, his penultimate opera, and one which, according to Winton Dean, ‘illustrates what may be called the Mozartian side of Handel’s creative personality, in which emotional depths are plumbed beneath a surface of light comedy’. I don’t know if that is a fair estimate, but in the production by Tom Hawkes, conducted, as these productions always have been, by Andrew Jones, neither the light comedy nor the emotional depths were discernible. The jog-trot mode of Handel performance which Jones favours tends to level things out; and though the soloists were a competent lot, they weren’t really more than that, so they didn’t have much to spare for characterisation.
The story, which is as simple as can be, and therefore wildly unrepresentative, is of the maiden Rosmene’s indecision between her lover to date, Tirinto, and Imeneo, who is pressing his suite on her, as the reward for rescuing her from pirates. Since Imeneo (Hymen) is the god of marriage, it would seem foolish of Rosmene to refuse him. Even so, she feigns madness to postpone the decision. You can’t judge an opera by its plot, but this one seems as slender a piece as this bald summary suggests. Nor was Edmund Connolly in the title role authoritative enough to suggest any kind of deity. The more performances of Handel operas there are, the better they need to be.
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