ENOs Katya Kabanova at the Coliseum, review

By Rupert Christiansen 417PM GMT sixteen March 2010

For the perfect distressing sadness, Katya Kabanova moves me as most as any show - maybe usually Madama Butterfly (a good change on Janacek) can hold it. Yet most as I dignified probably all the elements, David Aldens cold new prolongation left me isolated and emotionally unwithered.

The entertainment is clean stylised and minimally furnished. Costuming indicates the 1920s, the duration of the operas composition, but Charles Edwards steeply raked, epitome set leaves the space far-reaching open and mostly empty.

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Such imagery as there is will be informed to any one who has followed Aldens productions over the decades supreme changes of lighting, wonky perspectives, a ominous mass of men in dim suits, outsize shadows expel by people station up opposite walls.

At most levels, this does the pursuit ideally well. The account is obviously etched, and theres no clarity of overt understand or deconstruction. But it all feels somewhat slight and unsurprising, and I think that something consequential has been eliminated.

This is an show about people who are pitiable victims of their circumstances, denied any pick or shun route. Katyas tragedy is that she finds a little fissure of love in the ludicrous Boris, usually to be broken by her fright of bearing to a implicitly firm community. But Alden never suggests the cramping sparseness of a village, where everybody knows all about everybody else. On this level of a stage, Katya seems constitutionally unhappy rather than hopelessly trapped.

Patricia Racettes opening in the title-role compounds this impression.

An experienced and efficient American soprano, she sings with argent trust and presents a rarely positive thespian reading, but shes as well grown up and meaningful to have us feel Katyas helpless, boneless ignorance ­ the outcome is as well Joan Crawford; it should be some-more Mary Pickford.

The residue of the expel Susan Bickley as a chilling dominatrix of a Kabanicha, Clive Bayley as the repellent Dikoy, Alfie Boe and Anna Grevelius as the immature lovers who do get away, John Graham-Hall and Stuart Skelton as the gloomy specimens of strength in between whom Katya is held is utterly unusually good, and Mark Wigglesworths conducting is even improved than that. I cant think when I last listened ENOs band fool around with such wealthy brilliance of texture, with rhythms kept electrifyingly moving and the pacing ideally judged. Wigglesworth might be a tough taskmaster, but golly, does he get results.

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