There are few operas so well calculated to be moving as Janacek’s Jenufa. With its utterly simple, heartbreaking story of sex before marriage and infanticide in a tight rural community, its flaringly dramatic roles for the mistreated Jenufa and her murderess stepmother, the Kostelnicka, its earthy Czech choruses, its chilling storm scene and, above all, its final scene, in which forgiveness and love triumph against terrible odds, the opera is overwhelming every time. And if calculation is a cold word, the musical intensity is consistently scalding. Though the work lives on the edge of melodrama, the pulse of life is in every bar. The orchestra surges as if it were the very medium of existence; the voices turn the most ordinary remarks into passionate utterances (typically repeated). Life’s banality is laid bare and shown to be beautiful.
Jenufa is about the one thing that matters in the end — charity.
Such rhapsodising is prompted by English National Opera’s new production of the work — amazingly, only the company’s second — a joint venture with Houston and Washington. The director, David Alden, is a one-time Coliseum controversialist, but, back in the house after nearly a decade, he impresses with the sureness with which he allows music and movement to flow together, and with the clear space he puts round every gesture. There is a spaciousness to the action, even though the setting in Acts II and III — the Kostelnicka’s patched and peeled living room, with cardboard blinds to conceal Jenufa’s shame — is made deliberately oppressive. It is a sinister inversion of the enormous garage space of Act I. For it is hardly beside a “lonely mill” that this production begins. The Moravian peasant life of Janacek’s source has lurched into an uncomfortable east-European modernity, one that lets the costume designer, Jon Morrell, indulge a seemingly unlimited variety of styles.
But nothing gets in the way of the singing, and the cast is strong. Amanda Roocroft provides a sumptuous, heartfelt account of the title role, and looks the part wonderfully. The tenor Paul Charles Clarke is a brazenly feckless Steva, a playboy in biking leathers, while the other tenor, the Australian Stuart Skelton, makes Laca’s unshakeable, self-baffled fidelity to Jenufa deeply moving. The other main soprano, the American Catherine Malfitano, in her ENO debut, is a Kostelnicka of stupendous, swooping power, a tortured presence at the drama’s heart. Her only drawback is a slight gabbling of some speech-like lines, but that is mostly the fault of the Kraus/Downes translation, which is always cramming syllables. The conductor, Mikhail Agrest, from the Mariinsky Theatre, in St Petersburg, maintained a gripping pace and rose superbly to the challenge of that magical melodic shift that ushers in the brief, transcendent final scene.
On a completely different note, I was intrigued to attend our southernmost festival of music or, indeed, the arts. Fête des Arts, newly founded in Jersey by Mary O’Keeffe-Burgher, made a modest but firm beginning last weekend with four concerts that managed to include three world premieres and adroitly combined local and professional talent, local and international themes. Oddly, the events had a northern flavour. The Norwegian Espen Selvik conducted his own When Freedom Anchored in Our Bay, a cantata for two Jersey choirs and an orchestra stiffened by the resident ensemble, Psappha. But the work was, of course, a response to the island’s release from German occupation.
In the same concert, at the charmingly compact Jersey Opera House, were pieces by three Scotland-based composers: James MacMillan, Peter Nelson and Peter Maxwell Davies. Like Davies’s dances from his children’s opera The Two Fiddlers, Nelson’s specially commissioned Chansons Jèrriaises worked a spell with folk material, notably songs in the old Jersey language Jèrriais, a French patois still occasionally spoken. Taking four songs of traditional life (girl asks nightingale when she will be married, father gives girl a husband, but the cat mistakes him for a mouse), Nelson pays homage to a culture with which he is unfamiliar by using a discreetly Stravinskyan means. There are echoes of Les Noces and of Stravinsky’s Russian songs and choruses in Nelson’s spare and telling writing for Psappha and four singers from the Dunedin Consort. At the mention of the mouse at the end, the players start humming, and all abruptly leave, as if in sympathy with the short-changed wife.
MacMillan’s piece was one of three, each called in angustiis... II, each for a different soloist — in this case, the Jersey cellist- composer Gerard Le Feuvre — that were spread over the weekend. The title refers to Haydn’s Mass in Time of War (Missa in Angustiis), and MacMillan’s source of anguish is 9/11. The third in angustiis was part of an attractive piano recital by Sarah Nicolls at the Jersey Arts Centre, where she also premiered Kettletoft Pier, a tiny Orcadian evocation by Davies. The first MacMillan was performed by the Dunedin Consort’s soprano Susan Hamilton at the festival’s inaugural concert in what must be Jersey’s most picturesque church, the 12th-century stone- mosaic of St Brelade’s, poised above a ravishing beach. The little place proved acoustically ideal for the excellent Edinburgh-based group’s programme structured around Byrd’s four-part Mass.
The festival’s climax was a Psappha concert at the Jersey Opera House. In its 15 years of existence, the Manchester-based ensemble — successor, in many ways, to Davies’s Fires of London — has developed a chamber- musical flexibility and brilliance that makes it indispensable. Its enterprising approach to repertory was shown in a programme whose first half included Astor Piazzolla’s tangoish Fuga Y Mysterio and whose second was an extraordinary (if not quite convincing) compound of four movements from Mozart’s four flute quartets and commentaries for the same forces by the American Steven Mackey.
It was much to O’Keeffe-Burgher’s credit that the weekend ended in such a thought-provoking way. Good festivals often grow from the obsession of a single person. She has surely planted a fruitful seed.
