The Stage

Jenufa

Published Thursday 29 October 2009 at 11:20 by David Gutman

Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s direct, naturalistic production of 1989 returns to the Glyndebourne stage and will tour.

Giselle Allen (Jenufa) in Jenufa at Glyndebourne Photo: Alastair Muir

The music begins with the sound of a revolving mill wheel and, reassuringly, there it is stage right. Tobias Hoheisel’s picturesque designs, now slightly dated and a tad overlit by Paul Hastie, evoke a conventional order, a normality that perhaps has only ever existed on the surface of things.

Although less than stellar, the cast, expertly coached by conductor Robin Ticciati and revival director Daniel Dooner, is up to the composer’s idiosyncratic demands. With a tried and tested mixture of stiff formality and desperate emotion, Anne Mason’s Kostelnicka makes her fateful decision to murder her stepdaughter’s baby seem real. Giselle Allen, in her company debut, is a worthy Jenufa but sometimes fails to move us, the voice better at conveying anxiety and resolution than simple warmth. Peter Wedd copes well as a difficult, near-psychopathic Laca, while the conventionally dissolute Steva is entrusted to Pavel Cernoch, the one Czech singer in the cast. Susan Gorton returns to the production, a substantial, caring Grandmother Buryjovka.

In the pit Robin Ticciati elicits softer-grained sonorities than is customary in this score - Janacek’s sound world loses a certain sharp-edged specificity. Not that there is any want of passion as the Kostelnicka goes to face judgment, leaving a vengeful mob to wreck her property - Lehnhoff’s symbolism rather than the composer’s. As always, the radiant, redemptive postscript has emotive force and universal resonance. Life goes on. The wheel turns. There is hope.