Jenůfa, English National Opera, review: A ‘brilliantly effective production’

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Daniel Kramer, the English National Opera’s new artistic director, was rightly castigated for describing Jenůfa as obscure on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. As the well-sung, convincingly-acted revival of David Alden’s brilliantly effective production amply demonstrates, there is nothing to frighten the horses in Leoš Janáček’s masterpiece, only glorious music and the kind of truthful, complex human drama that makes verismo look footling.

Alden’s transposition from rural Moravia to an industrial Eastern Bloc setting designed by Charles Edwards works well in an opera, which is all about deprivation of one sort or another. Laca (rich tenor Peter Hoare) who has always been inarticulately in love with Jenůfa reproaches his grandmother for her lack of affection and favouritism towards Števa, his half-brother. When leather-jacketed bully-boy Števa swaggers in (a wonderfully physical Nicky Spence), it is already clear this local lothario is well on course to fulfil his destiny as spendthrift drunkard; his previous seduction of Jenůfa means little to him, and even less after Laca’s knife gash to her cheek. Making her European debut, Laura Wilde is a touchingly clear-voiced forlorn Jenůfa, but the most impressively varied vocal performance comes from Michaela Martens as the repressed Kostelnička, whose descent from ramrod authority to haunted terror compels belief in her infanticide as a self-sacrificing act of love. Further reason, too, to regret music director Mark Wigglesworth’s departure from the company: he gives an unbearably moving account of the score.

Performances on 28 June, 1, 6, 8 July