Katya Kabanova
Victorian Opera
Palais Theatre, St. Kilda
Thursday October 16
Desiree Frahn
Janacek’s opera is fundamentally a nasty piece of social realism that, if you don’t indulge in a bit of suspended disbelief, borders on the ludicrous, even allowing for cultural differences. The central figure is a remarkably simple-minded semi-mystic who gradually goes off the rails. Her husband Tichon has no spine and gives in to his mother at every turn. This woman, Kabanicha, acts in a manner that is irrational, temperamentally fitful and spiteful in turn, but she has the last word. Katya’s lover Boris is enslaved to his uncle Dikoj by an unbelievable clause in a will that will eventually grant him his legacy and he quits Katya for Siberia with lots of resignation but no compunction about her mental state.
The only wholesome characters are Katya’s foster-sister Varvara and her lover, the schoolteacher Kudrjas; both of them decamp to Moscow on an impulse just before the opera’s crisis but have been content with themselves throughout the work’s duration, the plot covering roughly a fortnight. Indeed, despite giving Kudrjas the opera’s opening lines and having Varvara provide a happy foil to Katya, Janacek gets rid of them with singular rapidity, using just a few lines in Act 3, so he can get back to the main plot and involve us in his suicidal catastrophe.
First and foremost, this was a vital, engrossing production from Victorian Opera which operated on a difficult-to-sustain presentation grid but carried all before it, thanks to the calm hand of director Heather Fairbairn who calculated a clear path through the work with only a few mis-steps. It would be hard to fault the excellence of the central septet of characters – Desiree Frahn (Katya), Antoinette Halloran (Kabanicha), Andrew Goodwin (Boris), Michael Petruccelli (Tichon), Adrian Tamburini (Dikoj), Emily Edmonds (Varvara), and Douglas Kelly (Kudrjas).
Just as impressive in its fluent consistency was the Australian National Academy of Music Orchestra which gave an idiomatically satisfying account of Janacek’s elastic score, finding in it a wealth of melodic infectiousness that had evaded my experiences of the work on disc and video. This was my one and only experience of the opera live and I doubt that it will be staged in Melbourne again in my lifetime. But it stands as a significant milestone in the company’s long catalogue of exercises, mainly because of its highly professional standard of accomplishment.
Much of the work’s impact came from the four main singers who gave us well-rounded personalities with all their imperfections intact. Just as much credit must be give to conductor Alexander Briger whose control of the orchestral fabric and coordination with his singers was exemplary, particularly when you consider the score’s often aphoristic nature, if punctuated by startling bursts of splendour. Yes, the ANAM musicians are on the cusp of professional lives and have developed their skills to a high level, yet the breadth of timbral control from the Palais pit and the quick responsiveness from all quarters impressed across the opera’s length, notable as the work was performed without interval.
One of the more deliberately obtrusive elements of the production was the presence of a roving camera which followed the characters through their stresses and projected their faces onto the set’s backdrop. What might have become a distraction of irritating proportions turned into an intense by-product of the onstage drama, giving us a rare chance to observe the characters’ powers of expression. This device proved most striking in the various stages of Katya’s stream of confessions and depressions, the tender naivete of this particular Boris, and an extraordinary portrayal of Kabanicha who became a glamorous, seductive figure rather than the tight-lipped hypocrite that you’d anticipate and expect.
Still, the production’s overall arch was dominated by Frahn’s heroine, a remarkably vivid outline of the young woman’s rapid fall to desperation, to despair, to guilty love, finally to self-destruction. This singer made a vivid experience of the long Act 1 scene II aria beginning with the birds metaphor Povidam, proc lide neletaji to the ecstatic conclusion to her dream a jdu – za nim! Later, her will-she-won’t-she duet with Goodwin culminated in a powerful cry of Zivote muj, mirrored by the tenor but with less anguish: a haunting passage in pages that speak of enthralment and the tragedy to come.
The night’s crowning moments came in the final scene where Katya is distracted and falling into an emotional gulf. This solid near-solo starting with Ne! Nikdo tu neni!, winding through the woman’s bouts of self-recrimination and imagination, her final words with Boris and the soul-destroying awareness at her death of peace and beauty – Tak ticho, tak krasne! – came across with telling pathos and an emotional depth, the like of which you rarely experience in a near-contemporary opera (1921).
Goodwin sang a finely-shaped Boris, semi-distressed at his own fecklessness in the face of his uncle’s bullying (the least effective interchange in his role) but an ardent lover in Act 2 and the model of soulful regret in his last appearance. This is a voice that graces every character it takes on with solid technique and resonant power, particularly at full stretch. Petruccelli made a fine Tichon, able to push back with vigour but turning into a weak reed when faced with his mother’s demands and his wife’s anxious pleas.
This Kabanicha wasn’t the ill-favoiured shrew that you find in most productions, as Halloran is far too glamorous to become the usual ill-tempered trial. As she should, Halloran dominated the awful conclusion to Act 1 where Tichon instructs his wife in subservience to her mother-in-law. But her attitude towards Katya was closer to toying with the defenceless rather than torturing with spite. As well, there was a hint of a fully-returned Oedipal fixation as she adjusted her son’s neckwear prior to his Kazan trip; well, it seemed that way to me, thanks to the camera’s proximity to both singers.
Tamburini made as much as he could of Dikoj’s two main appearances. The uncle is unpleasant to an extreme, particularly in his first appearance with Boris in tow when he lambasts the young man with a sort of personal vigour. If my memory is correct, he knocked Boris to the ground in this scene, which isn’t in the libretto but helped to underline the man’s viciousness. Later, in his confession of misplaced charity to Kabanicha, we came to one of the production’s odd spots when the woman beat him with his own walking stick across the backside – which suggested a weird kind of prostitute-client relationship between the two. I know Ostrovsky’s play that Janacek used as his source was meant to hold a mirror up to bourgeois hypocrisy but this seemed to be more of a ludicrous action than a didactic one.
Edmonds and Kelly enjoy the score’s happiest music, both in Act 1 and in the garden scene of Act 2; both gave us full-voiced, open-hearted depictions of two young people both beyond redemption and well past it. Michaela Cadwgan enjoyed her opening dialogue with Kelly, her Glascha less of a sourpuss than expected. Kuligin gets to work only at the start of Act 3 in discussing the storm with Kudrjas and then bringing Katya’s body in at the opera’s end; Bailey Montgomerie gave us a solid, imposing baritone voice capable of cutting through the mesh with his final line.
Responsible for both set and costume design, Savanna Wegman opted for a look that might have been favoured in provincial Russia-by-the-Volga in the 1860s, at least in terms of the costumes with plenty of earth colours, apart from a svelte dress for Kabanicha. Apart from this last, the characters looked muted and/or bleached; no objections from this quarter as such dressing seemed to fit the work well. As for the set, this was a pair of scaffolding constructs filled in with crossed wire, ragged cloth draped from the upper reaches, the whole collapsing to ground level for those final scenes by the river. Oddly enough, this precarious-looking arrangement made an exemplary ambience for the work’s proceedings, conveying a flimsiness or messy transparency which served as a mirror of both the social apparatus in play and the heroine’s deterioration.
While you eventually had no problem with the roving camerapersons hovering around the dramatis personae, the occasional (two of them?) appearance of young girls/wraiths dressed in white who moved slowly on to and off the stage did jar; I assume they were manifestations of previous or future Katyas but their emergence was meant to serve as a silent chorus to the young woman’s situation. Also, a filmed sequence of a young girl rushing along a riverside during the 99 bars of prelude to the swelling Act 1 opened us to a world of activity and a scene that the actual staging could hardly live up to.
These niggles aside, this night’s experience made for engrossing opera. Yes, it was a novelty for many of us, I suspect, and it enjoyed a freshness of interpretation that comes with a young and enthusiastic corps in both pit and on stage working hard to get things right, especially the singers whose enunciation of the Czech text presented as remarkably fluent and able. If I don’t see another Katya Kabanova, I have this production couched comfortably in the memory as a lodestone and as a fine instance of how formidable local productions can be.
O'Connell the Music 