Metropolitan Opera – Janacek’s Jenufa. November 9, 2016.

Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center.  Orchestra (Seat BB32, $25).

Story.  Jenufa is in love with Steva and is pregnant with his child.  Steva’s half brother Laca also loves Jenufa, who slashes her face.  Jenufa’s stepmother Kostelnicka hides Jenufa until the boy is born.  Believing the baby will lead a difficult life and bring shame to the family, XXX kills the baby.  Steva rejects Jenufa because of her disfigurement, but Laca still wants to marry her.  At the wedding the frozen body of the baby is found.  Thinking that Jenufa is the murderer, the villagers want to stone her to death.  Kostelnicka steps in to confess and is led away.  Jenufa wants to cancel the wedding but Laca reaffirms his love.

Conductor – David Robertson.  Jenufa – Oksana Dyka, Kostelnicka – Karita Mattila, Grandmother Buryja – Hanna Schwarz, Laca – Daniel Brenna, Steva – Joseph Kaiser.

The story of the opera is based on a play.  For whatever reason, Janacek cut out enough parts of the story, and the result a plot where the relationships among the characters are difficult to understand.  The Program Notes describes some of the missing links, and that helped considerably. But I can’t imagine what it was for those who didn’t get to read the Notes in advance.  As it was I got lost quite often.

Perhaps because of that, I couldn’t get fully engaged with the overall plot of the opera.  On the other hand, there were many emotion-filled moments in this play about ordinary people (putting aside the part about drowning the baby, and Kostelnicka means some kind of church official.)  These were undoubtedly helped by the great singing of all the major characters.  I saw Dyka as Yaroslavna in Borodin’s Prince Igor in March, 2014.  Tonight she sang with the same strong voice, but there was more emotion to her than my last encounter (per my blog entry, anyway.)  Mattila as Kostelnicka had a lot of singing to do also, and she did very well.  Indeed, she had a long soliloquy at the beginning of Act II which she pulled off engagingly.  As I type this three days later, I felt she conveyed her lines better than Dyka hers.  This was last staged at the Met about 10 years ago, and Mattila sang the role of Jenufa.

I wrote recently that Bartok and Kodaly were the first ethnomusicologists.  To their ranks one must add Janacek.  Although the opera sounded contemporary, there were enough melodies in it to give it strong folk favor (evidently Czech in this case, but I certainly can’t place it.)  The orchestra did its part well.  There were a couple of passages sung by Jenufa that were accompanied by excellent violin and viola solos.  The chorus didn’t do much singing, except at the beginning and the end.

The set is a carryover from what was used 10 years ago.  The foreground depicts the inside of a house with two walls converging into an opening.  For Act 1 the background is a wheat (or corn) field; for Act 2 the walls closed on each other to denote the house where Jenufa hid during her pregnancy, but opened up towards the end to show snow falling, there is also a large boulder inside the room, perhaps for symbolism; for Act 3 the background becomes the village.  The dresses tend to be basic colors – black and gray mostly.  Simple, but adequate.

Curtain Call with David Robertson taking a bow.

While I was assigned seat BB32, the entire row in front of me was empty, so I saw the opera seated in AA2 (one price level up.)  It had a great view of the stage, and the acoustics was good.  Only downside was I could see only the conductor and the tip of the harp.  Robertson by the way kept great control throughout, and led with precision a well-executed performance.

The New YorkTimes review raves about Mattila, but isn’t as kind towards Dyka, calling her singing “acidic” and presence “awkward.”  There was barely any mention of Robertson or the orchestra.  My puzzlement is why was she barefeet for two of the three acts?  Everyone else seemed to be able to afford shoes.

The opera is definitely worth seeing again.

I took the train up and had pizza for dinner around 70^th Street.  The opera ended at around 11:15 pm, so I couldn't make the 11:18 pm train back to South Amboy.  The 12:05 train was delayed because of work on the tracks, so it was after 1:30 am that I got home.