Pyrotechnic display

Sunday evening at the Barbican was a revelation, no less gushy word will do. Janacek’s comic opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek is the Cinderella in his operatic output, if you don’t count the very early works, whole or fragmentary; even the weird but kind of wonderful Osud is more likely to turn up these days. Broucek didn’t make it into Decca’s much-lauded Janacek series under Mackerras, though it is he who has supervised the new edition which was used at the Barbican. After the intense exhilaration of this performance, it is difficult to remember what the problem was supposed to be. Admittedly, if you stress ‘comic’ you have to admit that Broucek isn’t very funny, but neither are most comic operas. What is more problematic, perhaps, is the ramshackle nature of the action and the text, Janacek’s own, but with innumerable collaborators — no wonder he phased them out in all his later operas.