****

Photo: Mark Allan

There’s huge pleasure to be got from hearing the music of a piece like Jenůfa being allowed to speak for itself; that’s surely been the best aspect of Sir Simon Rattle’s series of January opera-concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra over the years. We hear the piece unfiltered through the mind of a director, doing the work inside our own heads. Directors are pretty much obliged by the current conception of their job to emphasise one aspect of a piece over others: in the last Covent Garden production, Claus Guth was so obsessed with oppressive social systems he almost forgot the important things about Janacek’s opera. Here, we get the composer’s view, basically unadulterated.

But opera is dramatic as well as musical, and removing the stage puts a lot of pressure on the singers. In a theatre, the drama can gloss over vocal shortcomings, but when Rattle and the LSO are creating a tumultuous, unrestrained orchestral performance right behind the cast, they really need to be on top of their game to compete.

In the second of the two Barbican performances, that wasn’t entirely the case. The Swedish soprano Agneta Eichenholz, standing in for Asmik Grigorian (whom we saw in that Covent Garden show) is an estimable performer possessed of exactly the sort of radiance in the upper range that Janacek uses to create his extraordinary effects of character and transformation, but there wasn’t enough variation in this particular heroine: in rather a downbeat performance, she started sadly and kept right on going, lending some weight to Steva’s unkind description of her as (more or less) “gloomy and weird”. That Steva, not incidentally, was sung by Nicky Spence with his usual scene-stealing charisma and insouciant acting, and I found myself sympathising with him more than is strictly healthy in a show where, while nobody is wholly bad, Steva really has very few redeeming characteristics beyond a bullish charm.

Another Swedish singer, Katarina Karneus, gave us the iciest of Kostelnickas, too, very much in character throughout; this was exceptionally well done, and it is she more than anyone who reveals most about how her mind works, but this incarnation of a woman whose genuine kindness is hidden, crushed, by the controlled frenzy of her conflicted past and determined righteousness was almost too effective. The torment was real and affecting, but her frigid shell made it hard to find a sticking-place for sympathy. Ales Briscein sang the resentful Laca in a forthright and passionate Wagnerian tenor; the eventual thaw in relations with Jenufa was more evident in orchestra than voices or body language.

And, really, this was all about the orchestra: a brilliant demonstration of how Janáček works out and develops his motifs, to be sure, but more to the point an exceptionally sensitive commentary on the action, with every nuance of relationship and mental anguish depicted with restraint and economy – except on the rare moments when Janáček lets it all go in blazing orchestral tutti or expressionist agitation. Rattle shaped things nicely over the three acts, with the increasing propulsion of their introductions, the luxuriantly romantic strings set against the jabbings of brass and percussion highlighting Jenufa’s place on the hinge of two eras. One of the highlights of the evening came in the violin solos, played with real vivid, virtuosic intent by the LSO’s concert-master Benjamin Gilmore.

Jenůfa is always a complicated, intense journey, and this was no different. If its emotions generally felt over-contained, if the orchestra majored in beauty and effulgence over the sort of edgy terror that Janáček can produce, this was compensated by the sheer magnificence of an orchestra unleashed, and the kind of fiery brass-heavy triumph at the end that blows away all but the most stubborn reservations.

www.lso.co.uk