By any standards Janacek’s opera, Jenufa is an extraordinary piece of work, visceral and devastating but seeing and listening to it at this time, with Russia invading Ukraine, gave it an added poignancy. This was something Tomas Hanus, the Welsh National Opera’s Music Director, felt so strongly that he gave a short talk before the show began. He reminded us of our own humanity in such troubled times and assured us that, tragic as this opera is, the work ends in forgiveness. It is a work about a community in a secluded village in Moravia and a reminder that even to the most ordinary people extraordinary things can happen. Though written over a century ago, it is also very current in its themes, particularly in the composer’s exposure of the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of the women in the piece.

The Music Director, Tomas Hanus, lived as a child in the same village as Janacek which has given him a love for this composer and particularly for this opera. It showed. The range from lightness to tragedy was beautifully handled and wrung the heart. This is one opera that always moves me to tears and that is partly because Janacek has written a naturalistic opera about people we can all recognise.

The music is full of the folk tunes of the area which Janacek loved and grew up with. In the overture, skipping rhythms and the heavily accented music which sometimes remind us of the composer’s contemporary, Dvorak, lead us into the first scene set in the village mill where all the action takes place. It is a busy scene, full of the musical chatter of the villagers, where we meet all the main characters. Here the love triangle of the two men – half-brothers Laca and Steva – who want to marry Jenufa, Steva unworthy but whose baby son Jenufa is already carrying, Laca riven with jealousy which causes him to cut her face with his knife, a scar which she thereafter carries.
Janacek has an extraordinary ability to set everyday Czech language to music. The Chorus of gossipy villagers chatter and flow, twisting and turning and overlapping in a way that manages to be both realistic and musically pleasing. To have turned the libretto into English could not have worked. So fast-moving is this chatter, however, that it is hard during all the crowd scenes to follow the translation above the stage.
Contrast this scene with the next which is largely a musical dialogue between Jenufa and her stepmother Kostelnicka. Jenufa has given birth to her son and the soft tender words she sings manifest her love for the infant, though worthless Steva has no interest and is hoping for a socially better marriage to the Mayor’s daughter. Kostelnicka, who was herself ill-treated by Jenufa’s father, has kept Jenufa in hiding to conceal her shame, but now out of her concern for her and realising that she will always be a pariah as an unmarried mother, she drugs Jenufa and drowns the child in the frozen river. This is largely a solo, where we hear the to-and-fro of her terrible thoughts. Susan Bickley’s deep voice throbbed with passion and led the audience in horrified silence through her terrible plan. It was clear that for her this was a resolution that she felt would allow Jenufa to lead an ordinary life, a resolve led by affection for the girl but with a clear understanding of what it would mean if she were found out.

This scene was claustrophobic in its setting, a dark room with little light which allowed us to focus on the drama that was occurring between the two women. Eliska Weissova as Kostelnicka had adopted a forward thrusting movement which gave her eyes a piercing quality and lent her voice strength and colour as she swung between resolve and terror. Her role is well-known to be one of the most testing written for a contralto voice. Bickley conveyed it with power and feeling.

Then comes the finale, where the characters of Jenufa, played by Tanya Hurst, and Laca, played by Peter Auty, develop. Both transcend themselves and the theme of forgiveness coupled with a gentler kind of love than hitherto shown in the drama emerges. A neighbour has found a baby in the gradually melting waters of the river and the whole sad tale is revealed in a scene crowded with all the neighbours, the Mayor and his wife and the soon to be wed Steva and the Mayor’s daughter. Recognising her baby Jenufa’s whole demeanour softens as she grieves over the child and, without caring for her character or position in the village hierarchy, she owns what she has done. Her sung prayer for the soul of her child is moving enough to bring tears to the eyes. Kostelnicka confesses, knowing full well that her admission of infanticide could be the end of her life. Once again this is a masterly piece of acting and singing; she makes no apologies, despite the fact that her sacrifice – to clear the way for Jenufa to make a normal life for herself – has been undone by her stepdaughter’s public claiming of her child. The Mayor makes sure she is arrested but she leaves with head held high. It is as if Jenufa’s own transparency has created a transformation in herself too.

The ending of the opera might have been devastatingly sad but justice, through Kostelnicka’s confession, has been done. Steva is shamed; he will not now marry the Mayor’s daughter. Laca, however, shows his worth – despite having scarred Jenufa physically for life. Jenufa recognises that he is not ashamed of her as most men of that era would be, sees her true and loving soul and that together they will be a rock on which scandal-driven gossip will founder.

The ending is one of the touches put in by Katie Mitchell, who directed the original production. We are shown a scene where Kostelnicka is walking amongst white lilies accompanied by the orchestral music which asserts the theme of uplifting forgiveness and transformation with a sublime lightness of touch and soaring of the string section. Light shines on Kostelnicka’s peaceful face. Is she dead and in Heaven or has she been forgiven and set free? We are left to make our own decision, but here is the Music Director’s promise in his opening address that humanity in the end wins.
Welsh National Opera is nearing the end of its Spring tour. I thoroughly recommend this production if it is anywhere near you.

Jeni Whittaker

Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824), roughly contemporary with Beethoven, was an Austrian musician. Highly acclaimed in her day as a pianist and composer, almost all her music is now lost although most of us are familiar with her Sicilienne. She was blind and, at the behest of her parents, underwent several appalling surgical attempts to restore her sight. She may have had affairs with both Mozart and Salieri – there are hints in letters. This is the story told by Errollyn Wallen’s new opera with libretto by Nicola Werenowska.

But there’s much more to it than that. This is production from Graeae, the theatre company – now 41 years old – which cultivates and champions the best in deaf, disabled and neurodivergent talent on the UK and international stages. The Paradis Files is Graeae’s first opera and is the most inclusive show I’ve ever seen.

It starts with cast and band members introducing themselves orally and everything they say is signed integrally by someone on stage. They also wittily describe their clothes, size and the set. Each band member plays a flourish or a couple of bars on his or her instrument before disappearing upstage to the band area. Conductor, Andrea Brown says a few words too. Her podium is downstage right so that both band and cast can see her – or one of the on-stand monitor screens at the side of the stage. Once the show starts there’s an overstage screen for captions which are artistically presented in a timely font, getting larger to stress, for instance, incredulity.

The piece is scored for a cast of six who work with two performance interpreters whose presence brings another dimension. Max Marchewicz, for example, who identifies in the programme biographies as “a queer, disabled, chronically ill and disabled person” signs with moving, balletic sensitivity and I loved the blue hair. Meanwhile Chandrika Gopalakrishnan lithely makes every nuance clear, sometimes climbing inside upstage piano which is part of the set. Both are fine actors whose reactions to what is going on help to drive the narrative forward.

Every inch an opera – there is no spoken dialogue – The Paradis Files, which reference lots of other works and composers never settles to a single style but neither is it pastiche. In England Paradis was known as “The Blind Enchantress” and there’s a lovely Mozartian riff on those words. And we end in Rossini-esque mode because it’s an upbeat story

Bethan Langford, who cheerfully tells the audience at the beginning “I’m visually impaired” brings warmth and depth to Paradis. Other actors lead her unobtrusively round the rather busy set and she sits at the piano stool in several scenes. Langford has a rich mezzo voice with some beautiful navy blue notes in the lower register. It blends particularly well with Maureen Braithwaite’s soprano. Braithwaite plays Paradis’s difficult, determined, troubled mother – a complex character. Ella Taylor finds lots of saucy kindness in Gerda the maid and her soprano voice is attractive too – although this gritty maid – feisty, trans and kind – is no Susanah.

Wallen’s score makes a great play with the “gossips”. In any other art form we’d call them the “ensemble” with minor characters emerging from their ranks. Here they come somewhere between an operatic and a Greek chorus – commenting on the action and furthering the narrative. And, of course, although we’re in the 18th and early nineteenth centuries this is a 2022 piece so Wallen has a occasional fun with cross rhythms, jazz and rock borrowings so that sometimes the gossips dance incongruously as they sing. It’s great fun.

The Paradis Files is directed by Jenny Sealey, Graeae’s artistic director and she knows, really knows, how to create stunning theatre. This piece is stonkingly good: intelligent, funny, moving, beautifully sung and skilfully staged. If this website required me to provide a star rating this show would be a five.

Co-produced by Curve, Leicester and opened there before two performances at Southbank Centre, The Paradis Files now tours until 12 May to Milton Keynes, Colchester, Hull, Perth, Cardiff and Sheffield. All details at www.graeae.org.

Susan Elkin

The successor to the Cambridge Handel Opera Group, the Cambridge Handel Opera Company aims to perform Handel’s operas in productions in which both music and staging are informed by the practices of Handel’s own day. The casts field upcoming performers alongside established singers, and the orchestra blends leading professionals with senior students from conservatoires across Britain and elsewhere. Four years after their inaugural production of Rodelinda in 2018, they returned to the stage of the Leys School with perhaps the least-known of the three operas (Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda) which Handel produced in the space of one remarkable year from February 1724.

Any concerns that a “historically informed” production of Tamerlano would mean three hours of singers standing and delivering baroque arias while wearing togas were dispelled during the overture when a band of soldiers in military uniform of the early twentieth century burst onto the stage in search of the defeated Ottoman emperor Bajazet and his daughter. The setting suggested post-World War I Turkey, and James Laing’s Tamerlano, with fez and toothbrush moustache, a young Atatürk. It’s not the first Handel opera production I have seen set in this kind of milieu and I suspect it won’t be the last; the intrigues of baroque opera seem peculiarly suited to the world of King Zog, Admiral Horthy and the other régimes which succeeded the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in South-Eastern Europe.

Director Dionysios Kyropoulos had aimed to incorporate aspects of the acting technique of Handel’s time into his production, and it is perhaps testimony to the effectiveness of his approach that for much of the evening I was not aware of it, the performances seeming perfectly natural within the constraints of baroque convention. A single set piece depicting a fallen classical column suggested a defunct empire, and served as couch or throne as required. The band, bigger than we often get in Handel with a theorbo on continuo duties as well as two harpsichords, was arranged as it would have been in an eighteenth-century opera house. One departure from historic practice was that the opera was sung in English in an excellent translation founded on that by Handel Opera Group founder Andrew Jones. Clear diction by the cast ensured that there was no need for distracting surtitles, and there was a great gain in dramatic immediacy.

In the title role, James Laing presented an almost effete figure who was nonetheless capable of unpredictable fits of rage and cruelty. He despatched his furioso coloratura runs with impressive ease, though his relatively light voice was not always well-balanced with the large orchestra. His defeated rival Bajazet is a rare big role for a tenor in baroque opera, seized with both hands by Christopher Turner. He too had an impressive “rage” aria, in which the big band came into its own, the singer borne aloft on tossing seas of semiquavers. But he also brought out the complexities of a role which might seem tediously unbending, and his embodiment of the character’s physical as well as mental disintegration in the final death scene – one of Handel’s most astonishing passages – was what remained in the memory.

The evening had begun with an apology on behalf of Thalie Knights who had been suffering with vocal problems, but in the event it was hardly necessary. In the role of Andronico, Tamerlano’s war ally and love rival, she brought a welcome inward quality to her most deeply-felt arias, gradually increasing in power as the evening progressed. As Bajazet’s daughter Asteria, Caroline Taylor commanded attention from her first entrance. This is perhaps the character in the opera with most agency, making not one but two assassination attempts on the title character and generally holding her own in a male world. Taylor was fully equal to the challenge, and throughout brought a steely intensity and powerful presence to the role.

Modern productions of Handel tend to assume that audiences won’t stand for three hours of the seria mood, and the entrance of Tamerlano’s “other woman” Irene and her entourage, costumed as if they were visiting a country house in a Poirot mystery, brought a noticeable lightening of the mood. Leila Zanette’s limpid mezzo and Jolyon Loy’s rich bass in his one aria brought welcome contrast in an opera when high voices predominate, though it was in these scenes that I felt that the baroque gestures sometimes tipped over into mannerism.

Directing from the harpsichord, Julian Perkins pacing and dynamic control brought out all the tension and passion of Handel’s writing. The whole evening was a triumphant vindication of Handel the musical dramatist – I hope we will not have to wait another four years for the next production.

William Hale