Janáček melodrama no match for Bernstein
Opera North, Grand Theatre, Leeds Osud; Trouble in Tahiti ★★★★★
London’s operatic menu this autumn has so far been paltry compared to the feasts being served up elsewhere. In Cardiff, Welsh National Opera has presented magnificent revivals of Khovanschina and From the House of the Dead, while in Leeds, Opera North has been curating a daringly imaginative series of six one-act works, all produced to a very high standard. Opera North completes its cycle with a pairing of contrasted rarities: one of them emerges as a small masterpiece.
Osud (“Destiny”) is Janáček’s fourth opera, written shortly after Jenufa, as he grappled with an urge to write something that broke old forms and caught the modern zeitgeist. Its short scenes, sharp changes of mood and large cast of passing characters might suggest his interest in the new medium of film, but it’s more likely that he was simply in a state of transitional confusion, cutting and pasting, scribbling ideas in and out, without any very clear sense of direction.
The result is a chaotic story of Zivny, a composer so paralysed by guilt over the fate of his dead wife that he is unable to finish an opera covertly drawn on his own tragic life. Opening with a magnificent carousel waltz, the score contains lightning flashes of brilliance and rushes of high emotion as well as orchestration of astonishing originality for its period of composition, 1904-5. But it doesn’t cohere, either narratively or musically, and what should be poignant is merely melodramatic.
Annabel Arden’s staging does what it can to stabilise this leaking, unstable vessel, but two lengthy scene changes don’t help and the moment at which Zivny’s wife falls to her death along with her lunatic mother is unintentionally hilarious. John Graham-hall hams it up as the tormented composer, and Martin André’s conducting captures all the music’s nervous energy. A fascinating oddity, but only for Janáček initiates.
Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, on the other hand, will have instant and wide appeal. Dating from 1952, it’s a sour-sweet 45-minute fable on the theme that runs through John Updike’s novels, Betty Friedan’s polemic The Feminine Mystique and the television serial Mad Men: the dysfunction of post-war American suburban life, in particular the anxiety behind the machismo of its husbands and the frustrations of its housebound wives.
Gently satirical but also wryly sympathetic about a marriage that has gone dead in the water, it is clothed in music of jazzy lyricism not many miles from West Side Story, which followed a few years later.
In Matthew Eberhardt’s fleet and witty staging, Wallis Giunta and Quirijn de Lang are perfectly cast as the hapless Sam and Dinah, and Tobias Ringborg conducts with the right insouciant panache. I loved every minute and recommend it warmly. In rep until Oct 20, then touring to Hull, Nottingham, Newcastle and Salford Quays. Tickets: 0844 848 2727; operanorth.co.uk