About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and whispered, ‘They’re singing in English!’ And so they were, in Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes’s translation. Janacek was obsessed with the shapes and intonations of speech; for a non-Czech speaker, a first-rate singing translation is really the only way to make Jenufa strike home with anything like the immediacy and realism he intended. But even with surtitles, the effort is useless if — as was the case throughout much of act one of this performance by Opera North — the singers are almost inaudible.
It might have sounded clearer in the circle. From the front stalls, however, the situation was impossible. There was no shortage of glory from the orchestra: big surges of string tone, lacerating violin and viola solos and a brass section whose lips must have been close to bleeding by the end.
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