Page 147 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

Trouble is, both play and opera insist on some
equivalence of the milieu – stifling life in a conventional
merchant’s house ruled with melodramatic harshness by a
dragon mother-in-law versus the open air, be it summer in
a garden at night or the call of the Volga. The human
drama is insisted upon by a superb team of singers and
urgent, detailed playing from the London Philharmonic
Orchestra under brilliant Glyndebourne music director
Robin Ticciati, but Michielotto cuts it dead at just about
every point.

Stephen Langridge, Glyndebourne’s artistic director, nails the
problem in the programme by chancing to hit upon what’s
absent as he reflects on why we need live performance after
a year of semi-silence: “[operatic] characters are observed, but also met”. Here we observe
them, but we never really get to meet them. Czech soprano Kateřina Kněžíková has everything
needed in the voice for poor Katya: flaming emotion, tenderness, heartbreak. But she never gets
to express those things with physical precision, beyond anguished pacing in smart shoes –
couldn’t she have taken them off for her garden adventure? – and a silence that’s not filled
enough with tension. We need to recognise a real young woman on the edge, as we did so
disturbingly with Amanda Majeski’s frighteningly “lived” performance at the Royal Opera in 2019.

The catching of a feather and the shadow of an angel in the orchestral introduction are beautiful
images. The trouble begins when the heavenly emissary is embodied in a young man, and then
by eight wingless, beautiful others: so distracting, especially in what should be the heroine’s most
isolated moments, or her brief moment of private desire about to be fulfilled (pictured above).
And what does Katya take out of the first descending cage? Is it a Magritte owl? A rock? An egg?