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The odd thing is that the director of this new production, Olivia Fuchs, is superb in Janacek. Her Katya Kabanova at Holland Park and Cunning Little Vixen at Longborough were models of inventive, emotionally engaged storytelling. And so was this: Nicola Turner’s designs placed the drama in its proper setting, 1920s Prague, with back-projections and a couple of wondrous, unexpected moments of stage magic (dusty stacks of legal papers suddenly rocketed up to the sky) to suggest that there are more things in heaven and Earth. Fuchs used the bustle and chatter of all that Act One exposition to help draw the characters. Nicky Spence was an awkward, over-compensating Albert Gregor (the tightness and focus of his voice was a real asset here), Harriet Eyley’s demure Krista wilted like a cut flower before Marty’s icy charisma, David Stout sang with a dignified swagger as Baron Prus, and as Marty herself, Angeles Blancas Gulin was simultaneously sensual and aloof, outlining her high phrases in flickering neon.
So again – why the failure of nerve? My guess is that Fuchs had her arm twisted, but in any case, having been jolted out of the opera’s world, I’m not sure I ever made it wholly back in. It might be unfair to say that the two subsequent acts (in which Gulin wore a crimson hairpiece and a white fright-wig before ending up completely bald) veered towards the camp, and that the brightly lit denouement felt too jumpy to allow the emotion to find its own level, even though Gulin – supported by bristling, fiercely unsentimental playing from the WNO orchestra under Tomas Hanus – absolutely blazed. Earlier, Alan Oke had somehow managed to be both funny and intensely touching as the decrepit Count Hauk-Sendorf. Overall, though, so much of Fuchs’s production felt, looked and sounded right that I wish I’d been able to experience it without a disruption that had a wrecking effect out of all proportion to its brief length and good intentions.
In London, Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducted the Philharmonia in a satisfyingly high-octane season opener. Vikingur Olafsson played John Adams’s recent piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Best Tunes? – a one-note work from which Olafsson managed to draw a rainbow of textural nuance, before upstaging the whole thing with a tiny Rameau encore that might have been moulded from freshly fallen snow. And then Rouvali conducted Mahler’s Fifth Symphony: an insouciant, interventionist reading, constantly teasing and petting at individual phrases, to which the Philharmonia – from the low brass upwards – responded as if it were a gigantic string quartet. The players sounded smitten with their young principal conductor; and I understand that they actually are.
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Also by Richard Bratby
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