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Asmik Grigorian and Nicky Spence in Jenůfa at the Royal Opera House.
‘Steely beauty’: Asmik Grigorian and Nicky Spence in Jenůfa at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer
‘Steely beauty’: Asmik Grigorian and Nicky Spence in Jenůfa at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer

The week in classical: Jenůfa; West Wycombe chamber music festival; The Midsummer Marriage

This article is more than 2 years old

Royal Opera House, London; St Lawrence’s church, West Wycombe, Bucks; Radio 3
Janáček’s rapturous masterpiece and a top cast withstand the Royal Opera’s rigid new production. Elsewhere, one threatened church hosts two of the world’s best viola players; and a new era for the LPO

A vast effigy of a raven, omen of death, looms over the sinning heroine. Silent women in black stand with faces to the wall, their puritan bonnets giving them menacing, corvine profiles: a conspiracy seeking its human carrion. Claus Guth’s new production of Janáček’s Jenůfa, the Royal Opera’s first since 2001, designed by Michael Levine and his team, is not light on symbol. It grinds out its themes with relentless, literal determination, rarely swerving off course to allow for nuance or subtlety. A workhouse-cum-asylum echoes a maternity ward, each metal bed with its own vacant “crib”. The beds become the cage in which Jenůfa must illicitly give birth. The set has no windows. Shutters form the front curtain for each act. You guess that at the end the fragile, central couple will step outside these shutters to face their future. They do.

Karita Mattila as Kostelnička. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer

Guth’s staging is so carefully constructed that it will either devour you or shut you out, floor you or leave you, if not cold – impossible with this wrenching 1904 score – at least neutral, longing to feel rather than watch. Some redemption comes in the strong last act, where the emotional ice at last cracks and chaos overwhelms. In contrast, the Hungarian conductor Henrik Nánási shines brilliant, generous light on Janáček’s music, from the first, nervous rattle of the xylophone to the radiant, major key ending, played by an ROH orchestra on terrific form. The draw of this staging, postponed from March 2020, is the cast, led by Asmik Grigorian in the title role, making her Royal Opera House debut, alongside Karita Mattila, once the Royal Opera’s Jenůfa, now her foster mother, Kostelnička. With Saimir Pirgu and Nicky Spence as the half-brothers Števa and Laca, and Elena Zilio – who made her operatic debut in 1963 and is still in sterling voice – as the grandmother, this is a matchless lineup, with strong chorus and supporting roles well taken. The wide-open set does nothing to help the singers, who rise above the orchestra, but at times only just.

Grigorian, the Lithuanian soprano now in demand the world over, has a voice of steely beauty. Her Jenůfa is unknowable, controlled, even when she learns she has lost both child and lover. All is kept in check until the unnerving last act, when passion pours from her, a torrent of raw anguish. Mattila still can own the stage, graceful, intense, complex, turning moments of vocal unevenness to fierce dramatic purpose. This revered star deserved her cheers. The one performer who really broke loose from Guth’s straitjacket to create a humane, tender figure was Spence as Laca. At first a bully, he stands by Jenůfa and, in a cloud of troubled and heartbreaking confusion, eventually wins her. Janáček’s masterpiece is watertight, the music a miracle. A heavy-handed production cannot crush it. Watch on ROH Stream from Friday 15 October.

There’s a small breed of elite international musicians who, away from the main-stage limelight, pour their energies into nurturing young artists, promoting contemporary works, staging bold, experimental festivals, often unnoticed by the wider world. West Wycombe chamber music festival, run by the viola player Lawrence Power, celebrated its 10th anniversary last weekend. The venue is the church of St Lawrence, isolated high on a hill, with its crazy gold dome and close association with the local 18th-century rake Sir Francis Dashwood and his Hellfire-club friends.

If the backstory is racy, the present incumbents, who for three days hold concerts in the church’s spectacular, Egyptian-inspired interior, are in their own way just as wild. Think how unlikely it is to find two of the greatest viola players alive – Power along with Brett Dean, an ex-Berlin Philharmonic violist, now chiefly a composer – tuning up together in the narthex of a rural English church, before giving a programme of exceptional interest and quality. They were joined by two orchestral principals of the Philharmonia Orchestra (violinist Annabelle Meare and double bassist Tim Gibbs) and John Myerscough, cellist of the Doric Quartet.

To start, Gibbs and Power turned Purcell’s Curtain Tuneliterally, a song written to be played while the curtain was raised or lowered – into a fiery, flamenco-style vamp, before playing the poetic Memento for viola and double bass (1983) by the Hungarian-Swiss Sándor Veress. The evening’s centrepiece was Dean’s string quintet Epitaphs (2010), written in memory of five departed friends, including the British conductor Richard Hickox. Any melancholy – and Epitaphs is full of zest as well as sorrow – was banished by the culminating work: Dvořák’s joyful String Quintet, Op 77 for double bass and string quartet, gloriously and grinningly played, bursting with melody.

Lawrence Power, left, and friends at St Lawrence’s church, West Wycombe.

Days after the festival ended, a local Buckinghamshire newspaper reported that St Lawrence’s, with annual running costs of £26,000, is under threat and could be shut unless the wider community steps in. A public meeting about its future is being held on Monday 11 October. This is a call to arms, to save a vital festival as well as a precious Grade I-listed building. More information here.

Unable to be at the Royal Festival Hall for Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage, under Edward Gardner in his new post as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, I listened on Radio 3, grateful for the network’s renewed commitment to live relays. Thanks to Oliver Soden’s award-winning biography and a wider softening of mood, Tippett is being given his due; not a moment too soon. This 1955 opera, with Toby Spence and Jennifer France leading the cast, and great contributions from the London Philharmonic Choir and the chorus of English National Opera, still sounds sprawling and verbally loopy. Yet the four Ritual Dances – three of which occupy most of Act 2 – sounded more captivating than ever. While other music comes and goes, they remain on my Desert Island list. The LPO has begun its new era on a high.

Star ratings (out of five)
Jenůfa
★★★
West Wycombe chamber music festival
★★★★★
The Midsummer Marriage
★★★★

  • Jenůfa is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 12 October

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