MONTREAL — An excited crowd attended Opéra de Montréal’s Nov. 22 premiere performance of the latest operatic project by acclaimed Canadian film director Atom Egoyan. Having done noteworthy stagings of Salome, Così fan tutte, and Die Walküre, he turned his hand to another towering masterpiece, one less known to Canadian audiences: Leoš Janáček’s 1904 Jenůfa — called in the original Czech Její pastorkyňa (Her Stepmother). In general, it was a powerful evening that reflected great credit on the company and its artists. It was salutary to sense a multi-generational, diverse crowd discover the power of relatively unfamiliar opera.
Native Montrealer Nicole Paiement led the Orchestre Métropolitain in a generally stirring reading, with impressive string playing and disciplined brass. Occasionally, she took rather long pauses before proceeding on from a dramatically powerful moment; this is a score that must press on propulsively like the village’s local millstream. The choral work — including how they handled the choreography — was admirably all-in and accomplished.
Deploying a mix of eras for costumes, set elements, and props, Egoyan and designer Debra Hanson may have confused some experiencing Jenůfa for the first time. But the worthwhile point seemed to be for us not to see this tale of female oppression in a judgmental late 19th-century Moravian village as something pertaining only to the past. Sexual double standards, shaming, and panic over pregnancy (one engine of the plot) are all too much still with us, as are dysfunctional family dynamics about dividing estates (the other engine of the plot, which Janáček’s mill wheel-evoking ostinato figures repeatedly underline).
Some visual touches proved more felicitous than others. The spoiled Števa and his inebriated posse wore contemporary clothes upon entering, in contrast to the rest of the family’s traditional rural wear. The wedding party scene yielded a cell phone for Karolka, with the — seemingly now inevitable — photos and selfies while the uninvited local women performed their folkish song. Positing Karolka and Števa as shallow narcissists certainly clicked, but I’d seen the selfie trope in three other productions this month. A tired cliché: having a character — here, again Števa — sip from a flask not once but thrice, even during the tense interview with Kostelnička, otherwise masterfully blocked, like most of Egoyan’s work here.
Egoyan seemed to feel that he needed to put a striking visual “button” on all three acts. The first one worked: Jenůfa’s rosemary bush, the libretto’s symbol of her marital hopes, often a tiny plant on a window sill, is here an enormous potted outdoor plant. Laca, in jealously provoking his (beloved) cousin, lops branches of it off with the knife he eventually uses to slash the cheek so vital to his stepbrother rival’s desire for her. At the act’s end, frustrated and guilty, he pulls the whole plant out of its pot.
The staging, as in common modern theater practice (and the opera productions of Ted Huffman), placed the action on a raised platform with those not onstage sitting close by on the sidelines, taking everything in. This spoke to the fear of being targets of speculation that both leading soprano characters voice. One wondered what would happen in the tightly plotted and composed Act Two — surely one of the greatest in the 20th-century canon — when having the playing space for the four leading characters closed off is essential.
No side walls appear at curtain rise, but the townswomen this time face upstage — until Kostelnička’s panicked imaginings of her shame if Jenůfa’s illegitimate son becomes known, when they point fingers at her and then exit, prompting her desperate act. The rest of the act — terrifically acted by Marie-Adeline Henry (Jenůfa), Edgaras Montvidas (Laca), and above all Katarina Karnéus (Kostelnička) — proves riveting. But just as the musical climax — Kostelnička thinking she sees the face of death — approaches, Egoyan has the set whirl around, revealing a high-tech view of the cracked, frozen river into which she had thrown poor little Števuška.
It draws crucial attention from the characters and onto the mise-en-scène, an underestimation or misunderstanding of the score’s power. The opera’s final tableau after the leading couple’s wondrous mutual forgiveness, though, delivered a real statement: Laca on his knees facing upstage to a huge, candle-laden Marian icon, while Jenůfa boldly approaches the proscenium, signaling the audience to see her removing her head scarf — and embracing greater agency.
Karnéus has grown from the capable lyric mezzo-soprano the Metropolitan Opera deployed 1999-2005 to a very impressive exponent of Zwischenfach roles; her voice is steady and wide-ranging, and her acting showed both power and nuance; she anchors the evening. Henry, a fine singing actress who’d sung Jenůfa in Toulouse, generates sympathy, communicating the young woman’s emotions with skill and grace. Her soprano lacks the plush refulgence of Gabriela Beňačková or Karita Mattila and sounds better in slower ascents than when faster tempos diminish the volume and harden the timbre.
The opera’s two tenors — a reworking in some ways of The Bartered Bride‘s half-brother rivals — need careful casting and got it. Montvidas, previously a Števa, limns a tense, complex Laca with enough reach in his essentially lyric sound to fill out the climaxes. Lighter of voice and a youthful veteran of many kinds of music theater, Isaiah Bell makes the attractive-repulsive Števa totally credible. Contralto Megan Latham’s Grandmother Buryja is mercifully steady in launching the great concertato “Každý párek si musí svoje trápení přestát” and sharply etched. Some of the small roles remain a bit unformed (linguistically, vocally, or dramatically), but Colin Mackey makes a suitably pompous Mayor and rich-toned mezzo-soprano Ellita Gagner is a discovery as the third act’s Old Aunt.
By chance, Jenůfa overlapped in time with Montreal’s 19th International Bach Festival, a serious undertaking spread over three weeks and a variety of venues. It opened strongly Nov. 21 at the comfortable, modern (2011), blond-wood Maison Symphonique, with conductor-composer Samy Moussa — a Montreal native based in Berlin — very capably leading Mendelssohn’s Elias. The 1846 oratorio — in its English version Elijah, a constant North American concert staple for a century — now gets played only occasionally. There are German-language recordings (notably under Wolfgang Sawallisch and Helmuth Rilling), but major North American orchestras rarely program it. Perhaps using the German version here served to distance listeners more from current events when the text invokes divine punishment on Israel’s enemies. At any rate, the libretto is concerned largely with issues of faith, doubt, and hope.
Musically, Mendelssohn afforded Moussa’s well-prepared forces and particularly Jean-Sébastien Vallée’s tightly coordinated chorus (not a huge Victorian assemblage but 30 expertly blending singers) much to work with. This was a fine performance. Curiously, due to Mendelssohn’s having reawakened critical interest in the sacred music of Bach and Handel, we’re much better acquainted with his models than were his contemporaries. Despite its fine orchestration and some memorable passages, Elias seems rather stolid and deficient in melodic distinction today.
The four soloists all displayed stylistic sensitivity. Konstantin Ingenpass, replacing the billed Matthias Winckhler at short notice, scored a success. Historically, Elijahs have often been weightier bass-baritones such as Friedrich Schorr or Bryn Terfel; Ingenpass, more of a lyric “Kavalierbariton” with a tenorish upper register, was verbally vivid; a light tremolo helped carry the voice into the large hall. He gave the libretto’s more enacted scenes (like the prophet healing a sick child) due dramatic impact, a trait shared by rich-timbred alto Mireille Lebel, effective and affecting throughout. Mireille Asselin’s light soprano sounded pleasing duetting with Lebel but a bit undergunned in the magisterial aria “Höre, Israel,” with its fast concluding section drawing on Weber. Leipzig-born tenor Patrick Grahl idiomatically deployed a fluid but somewhat nasal “Bach tenor.” Moussa attained fine ensemble and pacing throughout.
