Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne review - Oh! How the caged birds sing

An impressive cast round out this highly theatrical but powerful production
Kateřina Kněžíková and David Butt Philip
Glyndebourne
Barry Millington21 May 2021

The eponymous heroine of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova, based on a play by Alexander Ostrovsky, is a free spirit: she longs to throw off the shackles of the rigid social and religious orthodoxy that confines her and soar like a bird. Her extra-marital affair seems not so much a sensual infatuation as a glimpse of spiritual freedom. Damiano Michieletto’s new production for Glyndebourne dispenses with realistic or historical social setting, telling the tale through symbols: caged birds, winged angels, lights and shadows.

If the symbolism is sometimes a little obvious, it’s theatrically conceived and often powerful. Paolo Fantin’s sets, starkly lit by Alessandro Carletti, make much use of huge blank surfaces irradiated by hues expressive of emotional states. As Katya (the impressive Katerina Knezikova) reminisces with Varvara (the admirable Aigul Akhmetshina) about the peace and freedom she enjoyed as a child, the silhouetted winged forms seen earlier turn into a “real” angel, whose movements (choreographed by Chiara Vecchi) externalise her longing for liberation. Feathers from the wings of the angel and his confreres fly through the air in abundance: for this Katya, hope is indeed the thing with feathers.

The production is highly symbolic but no less powerful for that
Glyndebourne Productions Ltd.

A birdcage suspended from the flies represents the repressive confines of the society epitomised by the tyrannical matriarch Kabanicha, Katya’s mother-in-law, sung and acted with suitable malignancy by Katarina Dalayman. Her brutal plucking of the angel’s feathers is also a crime against nature.

The angel unsurprisingly makes himself scarce when this demonic force appears and there’s a telling moment when Kabanicha and her intimated son Tichon, delivering instructions to Katya as to how she must behave while her husband’s away, cover her with a black drape, as though smothering the life out of her.

A long white sofa, the only concession to a social setting, sometimes seems out of place in this context of abstraction and symbolism, but the second act ends with a dramatic coup: the angel is now caged like an imprisoned spirit, while Katya is confronted by two massive sliding walls gradually and claustrophobically shutting out the bright light beyond.

Knezikova’s expressive tone conveys the gamut of emotions to which she is subject, from innocent sensuousness to guilt-ridden anguish. As her lover Boris, David Butt Philip is equally impassioned. The necessities of social distancing tend to negate any real chemistry between them, yet the direction perhaps makes a virtue of this by emphasising the elusiveness of their love. Nicky Spence, in good form vocally, plays Tichon as an immature neurotic whose emotional register has been shattered by the repressive orthodoxy represented by Kabanicha. The potent final image is a multiplicity of birdcages, suggesting the miserably unfulfilled lives of so many.

Robin Ticciati conducts the excellent LPO and Glyndebourne Chorus (offstage but still making their mark) with due sensitivity to Janacek’s throbbing undercurrents that periodically and exhilaratingly blossom into lyrical outpourings. If those efflorescences were less heartwarming than usual, that was perhaps inevitable given the diminished forces of the orchestra, though Tony Burke’s orchestral reduction was skilfully enough done.

To June 19; glyndebourne.com

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