Perfect teamwork

I don’t usually associate the Vienna State Opera with adventurous programming, but staying in the city for a few days last week I was able, by chance, to catch the première of a double bill of two quite exceptionally rare operas, one of which largely deserves its fate, the other certainly doesn’t. They were performed in the wrong order — if one of a double bill is notably inferior to the other, clearly it should be done first. As it was, we began with Janacek’s Osud, perhaps the rarest of his operas, in a quite brilliant production by David Pountney, who is an old hand at this piece. I can’t remember much about his ENO production of it in 1984, but I don’t think it was much like this one. At his insistence the work was performed in German, which seems a sensible idea. Surtitles, in German and English, were available, on handy individual screens, which I’m sure Pountney didn’t approve of.