Arts & Entertainment

Czech tale of sex, love comes to HGO

Janacek's most famous piece deals with darker side of humanity

By Chris Brunt
The Daily Cougar

Imagine loving a woman with such passion that you chase her, embrace her, then suddenly knife her cheek. Picture living in a place where infanticide is a viable alternative to social disgrace. Welcome one and all to Czech opera.

Houston Grand Opera's production of Leos Janacek's Jenufa is a troubling, thorny, ambiguously beautiful triumph. Director David Alden leads the HGO ensemble through this weird Czech affair with a careful hand, maintaining a delicate balance of mortal horror and lyric splendor.

Soprano Patricia Racette sings the title role of Jenufa, a sensitive Czech girl who is the resident beauty of the Moravian village.

Racette's performance was by far the most compelling, as she acted pitiful and weak while singing with sonorous power and a gorgeous tone. 

Jenufa is carrying the illegitimate child of her lover Steva (Raymond Very), the town playboy, and herein lies the drama. Steva is of the charismatic, vulgar, prom-king persuasion. His stepbrother Laca (Stefan Margita) is of the pure and noble heart, madly in love with Jenufa, and something of an oaf. Margita's tenor, a sideways reverberation that blasts through the house like so many sunrays, may have been the best voice. 

In the composer's native village of Moravia, a provincial Catholic setting, a woman who bears a child out of wedlock is relegated to a life of shame and humiliation. Thus Jenufa and her guardian Kostelnicka (soprano Catherine Maltifano) are confronted with conflicting absolutes: the sanctity of motherhood and the unforgivable sin by which that motherhood was borne.

This opera was composed over a 12-year period and completed in 1903, after the end of Romanticism, somewhere on the cusp of Modernism. Janacek's score hovers between these two paradigms, his intricate, unsettling music sounding far beyond Dvorak, but not quite Bartok. 

This crucial dissonance permeates the entire production, and HGO seems to understand it well. Janacek's folk-inspired Slavic melodies meander constantly from dark to light and back to dark.

Incessant modulations deprive the listener of a base, or somewhere to plant one's ear, thus inflicting the audience with the same sense of restlessness endured in experiences by the characters onstage.

In good opera it is often unnecessary to read the subtitles. When everything works right, the force of the elements onstage inform the audience they are no longer spectators in an opera house, but participants in the artwork.

Certainly Charles Edwards' set design must be credited for its carefully sparse and melancholy framework. Also the somber costumes by Jon Morrell, which bathe the stage in dull grays, muted blues and faded blacks, stand out . Conductor Dennis Russell leads the HGO orchestra through Janacek's score with the usual accuracy and welcome of lushness typical of that ensemble. 

When successful, Jenufa is a disturbing night of opera. Janacek pushes at big themes, and though they are mired in his Moravian culture, he explores pride, redemption and the nature of sin with such urgent, terrible beauty that one cannot walk away unscathed. 

Jenufa

Houston Grand Opera, 510 Preston Ave.

Playing: Through Feb. 7

The verdict: This isn't opera-lite. Prepare to drink heavily after the show.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928) spent most of his life in the province of Moravia, which is the setting for Jenufa. His most celebrated and performed opera, Jenufa was also something of an albatross to the artist, who labored 12 years to complete it. During that time, his young daughter Oluska grew ill and it became clear that she would not live much past 20 years of age; Janacek had already lost his infant son to meningitis in 1890. It was recorded that as Oluska's condition worsened, she became more insistent upon Janacek to finish Jenufa for her. Janacek's emotional connection to the work intensified, of course, as another one of his children neared an early death. Thus the heavy themes of the opera and the sad drama in Janacek's own life united, inexorably, tragically.

 Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu