Review - Jenůfa - Canadian Opera Company, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✭

by Leoš Janáček, directed by Nicholas Muni

Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto

January 25-February 7, 2003

Jenůfa is a thrilling experience musically and dramatically. Under Nicholas Muni's taut direction all elements of the production--the grim, symbolic set, the lighting's potent contrasts of light and shadow, the highly detailed acting from the entire cast--combine to produce a tremendous emotional impact.

Helen Field's fearless performance captures the whole range of Jenůfa's emotions from joy to anguish to new-found strength. Miroslav Dvorsky, as the good-for-nothing she loves, shows his character's cowardice lurking beneath his taunts and boasts. Canadian John MacMaster brings out all the agony of an unloved man in love with Jenůfa. Unable to check his frustration he ruins her beauty only to hate himself the more.

Supreme among these passionately sung performances is Eva Urbanová as Jenůfa's step-mother, Kostelnička. She makes Kostelnička's decision in to murder Jenůfa's baby one of the most harrowing scenes ever witnessed at the COC. Hers is not the evil authoritarian as sometimes played, but a woman whose love for Jenůfa sees no other means to secure Jenůfa's future but through a mortal sin. The searing intensity of Urbanová's vocal and dramatic performance is overwhelming.

Conductor Richard Bradshaw propels the orchestra through a white-hot account of Janacek's pulsing, turbulent score. Jenůfa is one of the few operas to ask what happens after tragedy, to ask if the injured have the strength to forgive. A powerful work in an unforgettable production, this Jenůfa is unmissable.

Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-01-30.

2003-01-30

Jenůfa