Manchester Theatre Awards and MEN review of Opera North's Jenufa, The Lowry

The Archers it ain’t. Janáček’s everyday story of countryfolk is about the ostracization of an unmarried mother, her obsessive and religion-bound foster parent, and infanticide. So much for the Romantic dream of village life.

The psychology of the female characters is what the opera, Jenůfa, is about: the two men in her life, though important singing roles, are little but ciphers. Opera North’s 20-year-old production, by Tom Cairns (who also designed it) is one from their vintage period of English-language performances and none the worse for that. Screened surtitles, now universally used, might seem superfluous in one sense but even the best singers are not always 100 per cent audible against Janáček’s orchestrations.

I’ve seen this production twice before (1995 and 2002) and each time it’s had a cast of remarkable stature. Christopher Purves had a bit-part in 2002!

This time, though, they have even bettered the past. Swedish soprano Ylva Kihlberg – unforgettable as the ageless Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Case three years ago – was an extraordinarily youthful Jenůfa, and her European voice quality befits the character better than the American and English singers who have taken the role before, however skilfully. She was a young woman whose ‘fall’ caused her shame, bewilderment and awakening at the same time.

Susan Bickley sang the foster mother (the Kostelnička her formal title, as a kind of Ena Sharples of the village community) with unfailing power and beauty, and even managed to evoke a few pangs of sympathy for her desperate solution to the baby problem (though not many – she is the baddie of the story, and her deed is discovered when the baby she drowned in the stream emerges, preserved, after winter’s ice has melted).

Elizabeth Sikora also sang and characterized remarkably as the grandmother of the family. The two half-brothers, Števa and Laca, are both tenor parts requiring exceptional powers, and Laca has much the most attractive music, as befits his character as the one who stands by Jenůfa even though she gets pregnant by Števa (perhaps it is a bit like The Archers after all …). Opera North have a very good young tenor here in David Butt Philip, who I’m pleased to see is an alumnus of the Royal Northern College of Music.

The production itself seemed oddly abstract 20 years ago, and of course its method of framing the scenes with evocative minimalist shapes and images has become much more a la mode now. Its fierceness, though, does ally itself to the surging power of Janáček’s score, as the rustic tragedy plays out.