The Excursions of Mr Brouček review – Simon Rattle embraces Janáček's baffling but beautiful opera

The Guardian

05-05-2025

Simon Rattle's survey of Janáček's operas in concert with the London Symphony Orchestra has already taken in the three best-known of them – big, rewarding works that inspire grand thoughts about life and love – and now arrives at something a little more awkward: The Excursions of Mr Brouček. First performed in 1920 and based on satirical stories by Svatopluk Čech, the opera comprises two drunken dreams, linked only by their self-important dreamer – a man who cares for little other than beer, sausages and always being right – and by the singers playing the main roles. It's eccentric enough when staged; on the concert platform, even with surtitles to translate the sung text and an interval in which to scour Wikipedia for the details of 15th-century Czech history, it's baffling.
Since the release of the Prague National Theatre's version last summer, there's no longer a clear gap in the market for the recording that will be made from the LSO's two performances. However, that recording is likely to be first-rate. Behind the brittleness of the opera's characters there's music full of fleeting moments of beauty, and these receive their full due in a genial performance from Rattle and the LSO.
In the first dream, Brouček finds himself teleported from a moonlit gutter to the moon itself, colonised by the kind of artsy, vegetarian luvvies he despises. The second takes him to a besieged Prague in 1420, where he is horrified to find he is expected to fight alongside his Hussite hosts; here the music takes on a nobility that's knowingly at odds with Brouček's bluster, and the crowd scenes have reedy bagpipes lending a splash of medieval colour. Tenebrae deliver the choruses enthusiastically, although having them singing across the stage rather than straight at the audience slightly dulls their impact.
In both dreams, Rattle keeps the pace up, letting the music dance as it glides seamlessly in and out of waltzes and mazurkas, and propelling it through the militaristic episodes without making them march too inflexibly. Few singers could make as convincing a job of the title role as Peter Hoare, who gives a perfectly judged portrayal, periodically swigging from a lager bottle as he goes. The three main women he encounters – one real, two dreamed – are taken by Lucy Crowe, her soprano especially gleaming in the moon episode, with its silvery sound world; the corresponding male roles are sung by the clarion Czech tenor Aleš Briscein, currently peerless in this repertoire. There's strength in the smaller roles too, especially from Gyula Orendt, sounding velvety in the long oration for the author Čech, Stephan Rügamer, gamely throwing in some yoga poses as he sings, and the diamond-bright soprano Doubravka Novotná.
At the Barbican Hall, London, repeated on Tuesday