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Antonio Pappano’s 23-year reign as the Royal Opera’s music director is a dauntingly hard act to follow. Yet there could be no mistaking the support and enthusiasm with which the Covent Garden audience greeted Pappano’s successor-designate Jakub Hrůša for the first time before he takes over the reins officially in the autumn. This was, one sensed, a big moment for modern Britain’s responsibilities towards this so often and so unfairly traduced art form.
We were not to be disappointed. It helped enormously that the Czech conductor was on home musical territory. Janáček’s searingly contemporary Jenůfa, the composer’s 1904 tale of village violence, shame and forgiveness, is in Hrůša’s DNA, and he conducted it in Chicago a year ago. The Covent Garden orchestra has also played Jenůfa recently, when Claus Guth’s production was launched in 2021. Yet, with the art form itself on the line and the orchestra keen to show the new boss its mettle, Hrůša gave an account of rare intensity and authority, not to be missed.
Guth places Janáček’s drama in an alienated and expressionist setting. In ways echoed recently by Ted Huffman’s Royal Opera production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, he uses the full width and depth of the stage, enclosed here by slatted blinds and with a minimum of furniture or naturalism. The village mill is nowhere to be seen (though its rhythms percolate obsessively through the score), while Jenůfa and her foster-mother inhabit a cage, on which a giant raven threateningly perches. It does not always convince, but it reaches a truly liberating and persuasive climax as Jenůfa and Laca finally step slowly forward and out of the staging’s confining bounds, towards a new and perhaps happier life.
Vocally, the evening belongs above all to the two central female characters. Corinne Winters is utterly convincing as the vulnerable but indomitable Jenůfa. She inhabits the role with rare physical and musical credibility and her compassionate intervention in act three is exceptionally moving. Karita Mattila’s Kostelnička is even better than when she took the role here three years ago. Her unerringly stern but fearful stage presence is now enhanced by the return of more body in the voice.
There are strong performances too from Jenůfa’s male admirers. Thomas Atkins gives feckless Števa a convincing mix of vocal bravura and stage allure. Nicky Spence, though not totally at ease in the first act, richly illuminates Laca’s inner lyrical dignity in the third. This is also a show with luxury veteran cameos, including Jonathan Lemalu’s mayor, and Marie McLaughlin’s mayor’s wife, both of them a delight, but topped by the 81-year-old Wagnerian mezzo Hanna Schwarz as a memorable Grandmother Buryjovka.
