Jenufa review: a production infused with heartwarming humanity

Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian’s Covent Garden debut was eagerly anticipated - and she delivered
Asmik Grigorian in Jenufa at the Royal Opera House
©Tristram Kenton
Barry Millington1 October 2021

The young Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian has been garnering acclaim at La Scala, Salzburg and Bayreuth in recent years and her debut at Covent Garden in the title role of Janacek’s Jenufa was eagerly anticipated. The Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, once a glorious Jenufa herself, returns to the Royal Opera in the role of the formidable Kostelnicka (church warden), Jenufa’s foster-mother.

Expectations were high and very largely they were met. Grigorian superbly incarnates the tragic role of Jenufa, both in her anguished body language and her command of the part’s passion-infused lyricism. Perhaps the wide-open spaces of Michael Levine’s otherwise excellent sets, and her placing on them, don’t help her enough, but when she comes downstage with Laca at the end, her full vocal potential is at last realised in the rapturous redemption the couple undergo.

Mattila, for her part, delivers an acutely perceptive reading of the role of the Kostelnicka: terrifying she may be, but she also suffers. Here she is revealed as a frightened, vulnerable old matriarch, able to exhibit flashes of human warmth, but damned by her murderous plan to achieve a respectable marriage for her pregnant but abandoned foster-daughter.

Nicky Spence’s splendidly sung Laca matures from a lumbering, sinister social reject into a figure capable of a loyalty that offers some hope for the future. Saimir Pirgu is an impassioned Steva, his half-brother and rival.

Karita Mattila
©Tristram Kenton

Claus Guth’s production is at the same time powerfully, even heavily, symbolic and psychologically probing. The white walls and beds of Levine’s opening set, redolent of a mental institution, represent a factory where the village women are making items such as cradles and trousseaux. Their mechanised, alienated world (costumes by Gesine Völlm, lighting by James Farncombe) provides the backdrop for Jenufa’s tormented existence: in eloquent synchrony the women wrest liquor bottles from their menfolk.

In the second act, silhouetted female figures huddle in a corner wearing headgear reminiscent of a Handmaid’s cowl. From the group emerges an enormous crow, no doubt a feature of the sleeping Jenufa’s nightmare, which perches atop the aptly cage-like structure that is her bedroom. Equally symbolic are the ever-present shutters that define Jenufa’s existence, but which finally come down behind the couple as they hesitantly face the future.

Guth’s disposition of both principals and community unfailingly exudes a sense of menace: the desperate measures these characters resort to are clearly generated by the stifling ecosystem that has spawned them. Glimpses of beauty, such as a starlit sky, presage the uplifting final transformation. Henrik Nánási’s fine conducting highlights the textures that glint like a knife, yet captures also the heartwarming humanity that throbs through the work.

Royal Opera House, to Oct 12 (020 7304 4000, roh.org.uk) and available on ROH stream from October 15

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