Jenufa at the Royal Opera House review: symbolic, psychologically probing and more potent than ever
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There were two compelling reasons for catching this revival of Claus Guth’s 2021 production of Janacek’s Jenufa. The first was to hear Jakub Hrusa, in his first production as Covent Garden’s music director designate. The second was to hear the new Jenufa, the American soprano Corinne Winters, though she is not new to London audiences – she has sung Puccini and Dvorak at ENO, Mozart and Verdi at Covent Garden – nor to Janacek (two years ago she sang Katya Kabanova with Hrusa himself at Salzburg).
On the first count, high expectations were unequivocally met. It’s perhaps no surprise that Hrusa’s conducting of his compatriot’s music exudes not only an idiomatic richness in the strings but also a pungency in the winds (notably oboe and cor anglais here) and a thrilling vibrancy in the brass.
What could not have been taken for granted was the glorious amplitude of the soundscape he conjured: not a matter of sheer volume, but the kind of live experience a high-end quadraphonic surround sound system aims to replicate. Straightaway in the first act the clattering of the millwheel took on a minatory quality, anticipating the fateful face-slashing of Jenufa at the end of the act. In the second act it was paradoxically not the Czechness of the score that struck anew so much as the echoes of Sibelius in the throbbing string figure that opens the act or of Richard Strauss’s Elektra at a comparable invocation of the “good family”.
Winters has an appealing voice and uses it intelligently, but her vocal potential is compromised in exactly the same way as was Asmik Grigorian’s when the staging was new. The problem is surely with the wide-open spaces of Michael Levine’s otherwise excellent sets, the walls and cages of which powerfully evoke the oppressively confining social mores of Jenufa’s environment.
