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At the Barbican we had a perfectly presented concert staging, the characters indicated mainly by their headgear, and with a tactful use of lighting; surtitles, presumably causing the better informed members of the audience acute irritation, above and behind the chorus. The cast was almost entirely of Czech singers, few of whom I had heard of, but all of whom I’d be delighted to hear and see again. The Mr Broucek of Jan Vacik was wonderful, without a hint of the exaggerated swaggering which we always see on the operatic stage to prompt our mirth. Zdenek Plech, who played the vast landlord of the inn, was a presiding benign presence. And the chief female singer, Maria Haan, is an enchanting lyric soprano who it’s amazing hasn’t been snatched by a Western European record company and promoted as ‘the next…’. I have no space for more names: eventually Radio Three, supposing it survives that long, will broadcast this performance and anyone can judge how marvellous the teamwork was.
Jiri Belohlavek led the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra with inspired fervour and precision. The whole thing — it may be Janacek’s longest opera — was at full throttle, with little quiet singing and not much more quiet playing, but that chimes in with what is, despite any intentions Janacek may have imagined he had, congruent with the celebratory nature of the piece. It seems always to be his purpose to transfigure, and the harder the job the more exultant he becomes. I don’t know whether he read Nietzsche, but his work often seems to be what Nietzsche came to hope for from art: a way of making everything we are confronted with in life a matter for jubilation. At his most problematic Janacek tries that with a Siberian prison camp. Broucek might be thought to be even more tricky, because here it is a matter not of the terrible, which tragedy has traditionally seen as something which we can face and emerge positively from; but of the mundane, the trivial, the endless futile wrangling which many people’s lives consist of (significantly, Janacek gives politics and politicians a wide berth — even he might have recoiled from doing anything for them). So the story, such as it is, of Broucek hardly matters at all. It is the ambience which he brilliantly conveys, and then lets off an endless pyrotechnic display of fanfares, so that what might begin as the audience’s boredom or contempt is pushed aside, and Janacek asks us if we can waste our time being irritable when we might be shouting with excitement and high spirits. That is implicit in almost everything he wrote, but at the moment I can’t feel he ever succeeded more splendidly than in The Excursions of Mr Broucek, or that that work has ever been as completely realised as in this performance.
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