Opera Notes: Jenůfa, Giulio Cesare, Nabucco

A lot of opera action lately on the big screen at Il Teatro Bruce. A quick summary:

• The pick of the week is Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa, from Kultur (link), a nasty little story tale peasant lust and infanticide, and what’s not to like? The Czech language (or is it Moldavian dialect?) lends itself to this kind of raw humanity; it carries a lot more conviction than the kind of dilletantism you get from Puccini. And I have to admit I found it a lot more accessible than Cunning Little Vixen, which I have to admit I don't really get.

The pick of Jenůfa is Anja Silja, hitherto unknown to me, who seems to have had a long, busy, interesting career that invites more attention (link). Roberta Alexander in the title role is good also, although she has less to do except to sound baffled and desperate. The men were fine, but their characters are more limited so they didn’t have the scope to dazzle.

• David McVicar’s Giulo Cesare (link) (also from Glyndebourne) is perhaps more assertively controversial—at first blush it looks like the kind of high-saliency high camp you expect from Peter Sellers. But McVicar offers something often missing from Sellers: music. Maybe the credit goes to the music director, William Christie, but in any event, it is interestingly sung, well played, throughout. Cleopatra and (especially) Cesare are well cast, but this performance really belongs to Patricia Bardon (as Cornelia, widow of Pompey) and Angelika Kirschlager (as Sesto, Pompey's son).

The campy staging (McVicar himself calls it “Bollywood”) is a question. It certainly gives reviewers something to talk about. I’d say that it works, but only because the cast is so strong—with weaker singers, you’d notice, and be offended by, the staging much more quickly.

• Verdi’s Nabucco (link) is a different matter altogether. If I read the liner notes right, this is was Ricardo Muti’s debut performance as music director at La Scala in 1987—a job he left amid some rancor just a couple of years back. The audience loved it, and it was well sung, but you can’t get away from the notion that this is second-tier Verdi: interesting, certainly worth seeing once, but not something I’d hurry back to (I may be a dissenter here; apparently it has enthusiastic acoloytes). You can almost imagine the young Verdi, like the young Shakespeare at one of his own first plays, watching from the wings and saying “hm, won’t do that again.”