World-class music, heavily symbolic staging: Glyndebourne’s Katya Kabanova reviewed

At the first night of Glyndebourne Festival 2021 there was relief and joyful expectation as Gus Christie made his speech of welcome. Never mind the hit to takings from the closed bar and the necessarily half-empty auditorium; never mind the scaled-back orchestra and abridged score. The new production of Katya Kabanova provided the thirsty opera-goer with a long cool drink of world-class music and heavily symbolic staging.

Janacek’s exploration of a yearning female psyche has parallels with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. It lives or dies by its lead, and the Czech soprano Katerina Knezikova excelled as Katya. Casting off her worldly glamour, she was utterly convincing as the soulful provincial wife whom Janacek conceived as ‘gentle by nature, a breeze would carry her away’. She sang with delicacy and power, even when fitting herself into a small iron birdcage, which was then raised cautiously aloft, a place of refuge turned gibbet.