Polar exploration

Opera North’s new production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova is the most moving I have seen, though it is not the best produced, best sung or most consistently cast. There are two things that make it indispensable to a lover of this wonderful work: the first is the brilliant, perceptive and thought-provoking essays in the programme by Stuart Leeks and, especially, David Nice. The second is the overpoweringly penetrating conducting of Richard Farnes, who shows with every opera he conducts that he is as versatile and deep a conductor as any alive today.

What Farnes realises about Katya is that it is the opera in which the two poles of Janacek’s vision, pitiless bleakness at one extreme and consuming warmth at the other, are juxtaposed in the starkest terms, that no compromise between them is reached or possible, and that bleakness has the last word. The fundamental paradox of all this composer’s art is that passages of manic exultation and desperate lyricism leave us with a feeling of affirmation, but that he knows that that feeling is one maintained in spite of…everything.