Arts
Two leading ladies
Rodney Milnes
The Malcropoulos Case (Cardiff) Katya Kabanova (Edinburgh) It's not often that one can see performances of Janacek operas on consecutive evenings in this country, and it always involves travel. By happy chance, the opening of The Makropoulos Case, the second offering in the joint Welsh National Opera/Scottish opera cycle, was followed the next evening by the Frankfurt Opera's visit to Edinburgh with Katya Kabanova. The interval, a sevenhour train journey, would have been more pleasant had there been a buffet car, as advertised, at any stage of it. I imagine the trade description act does not apply to nationalised industries.
For his production of .Makropoulos, David Pountney goes back to the Capek play both for period — 1920s instead of Janacek's turn of the century — and atmosphere, which is very much that of grotesque comedy. Capek had read Back to Methusaleh in synopsis and, more pessimistic and realistic than Shaw, saw how intolerable a burden three hundred years' experience of human frailty would be. Janacek in his turn felt great compassion for Elina Malu-opoulos, the woman who for reasons of that frailty had been forced to bear the burden, and with his unique double vision (c f The House of the Dead and Vixen) turned her eventual celebration of death's release into something approaching a celebration of life. Only the very fact of death grants life any meaning. Janacek isolates those moments amidst the sordid intrigue surrounding Elina's magic formula — which in Pountney's production is mordently funny — when the weight of experience, the despairing world-weariness break through, and clothes them in music of such extraordinary fellowfeeling and tenderness that it is like being punched in the belly just as you are heaving with laughter. And laugh one certainly did. It was fascinating to note in so alert and inventive a production that some of those odd pauses in the dialogue, which at first hearing can sound like less than fluent setting, must be there for the purpose of stage reaction, for double-takes, almost. And with a character who keeps chattering about people long dead, there is plenty of room for those.
To impersonate this complex amalgam of wholly justifiable cynicism and deeply-felt regret, the company was fortunate to have Elisabeth Seiderstreim, one of the world's great operatic artists. The detail in her per formance was spell-binding, the quicksilver changes of mood from impatience to rage to blind panic precisely pointed, the three hundred-year-old depth of character suggested by the most economic of means. She sang the anonymous (collective?) new translation in impeccable English. There were times, I think, when she just went over the top; the moment when she remembers having heard Strada is surely a throwaway line, not the cue for a prima-donna temperament; and the scene of the 'souvenirs', the scars dealt by those who have tried in vain to kill her, is horrifying enough on its own account without recourse to toneless, hysterical shouting. The role is a brute to sing, but her famous technique — she must have throat muscles of steel — saw her through. Some colleagues detected tired ness in the final scene, but from that cry from the soul of `Elina Makropoulos' (in answer to those probing at her true identity) onwards, I was so involved in her total performance that she could have turned into a baritone without my noticing. The threehundred-year ageing, incidentally, was managed more by skilful physical acting than by make-up or trick lighting. The performance of a lifetime.
The supporting cast was grotesquely excellent: Mark Hamilton's fatuous Gre gor, straight out of P.G. Wodehouse (and vocally sorely tested, though no one could criticise him for that); Thomas Hemsley's self-important lawyer; Helen Field's Kris tina, a dizzy flapper; Neil Howlett's icily perverted Prus; and so on down to Russell Smythe's moronic stage hand. Maria Bjornson's costumes served the generally sharp characterization, and her sets suggested the clutter of those three hundred years of sickening memory. Richard Armstrong's conducting was forceful, the play ing warm-textured. There were only moments in the first act when the stringheavy tone covered the words, and this can be put right once the tensions of so important a first night are passed.
One of the few notable things about the Frankfurt Katya was the playing under Michael Gielen which, in contrast to Arm strong's full-blooded approach, was cleanlimned, utterly clear of texture. You could hear all the notes, and all the words (sung in a German translation by Joachim Herz). In the title-role was Hildegard Behrens, another soprano with a cast iron technique who gave us singing of the very highest order. She is also an extremely intelligent actress, and I only wish the production, by the film director Volker Schloendorff, had been worthy of her.
Janacek's Kayta is more than a neurotic suburban wife — she is a passionate woman whose every human instinct has been suppressed by society, and one who cannot cope with the sudden release. All she was made to do at the first meeting with her lover was ill-motivated, and the finale was turned into a conventional, Lucia 41 Lammermoor-type mad scene. There is more than that to the ctushing of a huMan soul in Janacek's terms: There were other miscalculations. The staging of her last meeting with Boris as a memory — or a fan' tasy —did not begin to work. Although there is the suggestion of a sadomasochistic relationship between Kabanicha and DikoY act two, it remains just that, a suggestion, and to turn it into a fully staged flagellation session was an unforgivable vulgarity, as was the disposition of Katya's underwear in the second act, and the sight of sullen peas' ants advancing threateningly on Kabanicha at the end of the opera. A revolutionag statement? Something of that nature, I rather fear, and the product of a mind less than perfectly in tune with Janacek's. It would be unfair to comment nil Ekkehard Griibler's decor as too much c!' it had been left at home, where I am sure it looks very nice. The supporting cast was e' good, solid German repertory standarcll with a fine Kudryas from Heinz Meyen, ant Sona Cervena's famous Kabanicha, a f°,midable study in lip-smacking malice an' never more terrifying than when she sallies,' She had no need whatever of that wretcheu whip.
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