Káťa Kabanová review – furtive groping and a wing-bloodied angel stalk flawed staging of Janáček's opera

The Guardian

3 days ago

The final production of the current Glyndebourne season is a revival of Damiano Michieletto's staging of Janáček's Káťa Kabanová, first seen in 2021, as the UK emerged from lockdown, with the cast socially distanced on stage and a reduced orchestration used in the pit. Now, of course, conductor Robin Ticciati reverts to Janáček's original score. I didn't see Michieletto's original, however, and so cannot tell how much may have changed dramatically.
An inconsistent staging, it transforms an essentially naturalistic work into a symbolist exploration of its heroine's mind, and an opera essentially about the darkness of the human soul, is now reimagined in antiseptic, clinical white. There's little suggestion of the natural world that mirrors the central crisis, only a phosphorescent glare seen between the cracks of the white walls that hem Kateřina Kněžíková's Káťa in. Michieletto is unsparing in his depiction of Kabanicha's (Susan Bickley) abuse, yet at the same time, the social background is curiously vague here, and we lose sight of Káťa's tragedy as emblematic of conflicts between reactionary authoritarianism and emerging liberalism.
Instead, Michieletto realises her dreams and fantasies. She imagines flying free like a bird, though bird cages, proliferating on stage, only serve to enhance her growing sense of entrapment. The angel she dreamt of in church as a child, now stalks her adult imagination, wounded, its wings bloodied. This ambivalent figure, male and stripped to the waist in 2021, has now become female androgynous and Byzantine, though the image is overused. Its feathers flutter down as Kněžíková yields to Nicky Spence's Boris, though Michieletto ruins the subsequent love scene by bringing Bickley on stage to pluck the angel's wings and immure it in a cage, a horrendous distraction. Michieletto doesn't always trust the score: in Act I, the exquisite passage intended to mark Káťa's first appearance now accompanies furtive groping between Sam Furness's Kudrjáš and Rachael Wilson's Varvara, leaving Kněžíková to slope on a few minutes later, though we have already seen her during the prelude.
Much of it sounds extremely fine, however, though Ticciati, conducting the London Philharmonic, is perhaps stronger on the score's lyricism than its incipient violence: the close of Act I, and indeed the climactic storm that unhinges Káťa's mind, could have been more tense than they were on opening night. Kněžíková is really lovely in the title role, her tone silvery yet warm, her dynamic control immaculate, vivid in her delineation of Káťa's inner conflict. Spence sounds wonderfully ardent, but by the end we are also painfully aware of Boris's essential cowardice and weakness of will. Bickley, tremendous here, gives us her most terrifying Kabanicha yet. Furness and Wilson, meanwhile, are just delightful as the couple who manage to escape the nightmare that surrounds them. A flawed production, but finely sung.
In repertory until 23 August