Brno is a city to which Janáček is indelibly linked; to see one of his operas at the theatre and festival that bears his name is an experience equivalent to seeing Wagner in Bayreuth or Rossini in Pesaro – there’s a palpable sense that the composer’s music is in the essence of both performers and the surrounding infrastructure. The Janacek Festival proper this year runs through October-November, but offers a mini-festival by way of its Preview, the highlight of which was the visceral Kátya Kabanová.
Robert Carsen’s production has been around for some years and has been seen beyond Brno in cities such as Madrid and Turin, but it remains visually striking with a Grecian feeling of ritual and fated disaster. Patrick Kinmonth’s set is visually compelling: the opening scene shows women in white dresses lying on a stage filled with water, prefacing the titular character’s eventual fate. Wooden boards are repurposed, forming a long path for the first scene, then shifting to create a small room – the Kabanov residence – before taking its final form of two long lines to represent the riverbank. It’s deeply symbolic and, despite the amount of open space, Carsen’s staging gives us a sense of the claustrophobia which is such a feature in Kátya's life; that bare room in the Kabanov house feels stifling and airless, a place where emotion and freedom of thought die amid starched collars and weaponised etiquette.
The title role was taken by Kateřina Kněžíková who is a veteran of this opera and clearly has a profound understanding of the character. Kněžíková gave the audience a Kátya of deep sorrow, whose brief happiness – a glorious glimpse of the bright after so much darkness – curdles as she battles with its repercussions. On a stage full of engaging principals, Kněžíková held both the eye and the ear; her soprano is thick and creamy, with a heft that allowed it to power across the orchestra. The Czech text was savoured and enunciated in that way that only a native speaker can achieve.
Boris was sung by Peter Berger with a bark to his tenor; his is an incisive, yet muscular instrument, well-suited to the character and making a fine contrast to Gianluca Zampieri’s lighter voice in the role of Tichon. Janáček provides so much detail that it is hard to go wrong, but Zampieri captured Tichon’s timorous approach adroitly, before giving an excellent horrified recoil from his mother – his independence discovered too late, of which he is bleakly aware.
Jana Hrochová sang Kabanicha with a monochrome palette; no colour or warmth entered the voice, just shadow and the soulless white of an operating theatre. The warmth, the hope came from the second pair of lovers, Varvara and Váňa, sung respectively by Václava Krejčí Housková and Vit Nosek, who gave a compelling depiction of innocent young love. Housková in particular brought a delicate and slim instrument to the role, agile at the top, but secure further down. Completing the principals, Jan Šťáva gave a brutish Dikoj, deploying a saturnine bass that captured the character’s bleak unpleasantness. Despite the excellent singing from the stage, though, the finest performance came from the house orchestra under Ondrej Olos; seething strings, agile woodwind and at times positively chilling percussion all in total unity at a pace that both savoured the composer’s unique writing and drove forward the action. An utter treat to hear.
