Karita Mattila rocks LA Opera's Jenufa

(Karita Mattila in Act 1 of Jenufa at Los Angeles Opera. Photo by Robert Millard/LA Opera.)

Thurs., Sept. 27 -- LA Opera's production of Janacek's Jenufa (imported from the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera) features lots of rocks, of both the figurative kind and the literal kind. Of the figruative, there is Karita Matilla, dramatic Finnish soprano extraordinare, who as the heroine Jenufa, simply rocks (as in: is awesome). Through her strong performance she provides a solid foundation for the entire evening. And there is also Eva Urbanova as Jenufa's stepmother, providing a similarly powerful bedrock performance.

Then, in the literal sense, there are the rocks on stage: giant rocks and stones showing up in different configurations all over Frank Philipp Schlössmann's set. In Act 1, a giant rock is breaking its way through the stage floor, a harbringer of difficulty to come. By Act 2, the rock has become an enormous hulking boulder that sits in the middle of Jenufa's living room, while Jenufa and her stepmother contemplate what to do with their very sticky situation. In Act 3, the giant boulder has shattered, we see rock bits strewn about the stage; concurrently, the weight of the drama has lifted from the characters as well as the plot moves towards resolution. Much subtlety in direction and scenic design, right? I won't deny the design's visual oomph, but all that Symbolism with a capital S felt silly at times...

The distraction of the physical rocks didn't matter so much, though, with Karita Mattila and her powerful performance. In the Act 3 finale, she stepped downstage over towards where I was sitting, turned toward the audience and just let loose: it was raw and totally emotional sound - a person undoubtedly being in the same room with you and revealing everything in a sound that can only be experienced live. It was truly one of the most exciting moments I've experience at the opera.

I also really like this particular opera: composed by Czech composer Leos Janacek, the opera is very unusual sounding with with its instrumentation and the through-composition (no usual breaks for applause after arias, it just barrels through each act). Particularly fascinating is the use of a xylophone, which starts off the opera beating steadily as the sound of the orchestra crescendos around it - the thudding xylophone returns, hauntingly, at key dramatic points in the opera. The through-composition keeps the drama firmly within the music instead of stopping and starting for climactic arias and such; melodies build and then suddenly disappear as the conversation or thought moves along. I became totally fascinated by the score last year on the broadcast from the Met, right after hearing the xylophones in the overture. Thursday night, James Conlon conducted a brilliant reading of it: the orchestra played a finely nuanced performance and those xylophones rang out loud and clear.

The other singers on stage provided excellent performances as well; in fact I was impressed at how well the production was unified as a cohesive, dramatic whole. There was plenty of melodrama but we believed the emotion of what was going on. The story of Jenufa follows the title character, a girl who falls for a handsome but unreliable mill owner Steva and becomes pregnant by him - but the mill owner decides to marry he mayor's daughter instead, leaving Jenufa with the baby. Desperate to save their reputations, Jenufa's stepmother, the Kostelnicka, hides Jenufa away and when the baby is born, decides it is better to secretly kill the baby than face the shame that will fall on Jenufa. Meanwhile, Laca, who loves Jenufa and had slashed her face in jealousy before, comes repentant and willing to marry Jenufa, even after learning that she had a child by Steva.

Eva Urbanova's Kostelnicka was at once overbearing and sympathetic - there was her sternness in scolding Jenufa's behavior, but we see a very human reason, too, that pushes her towards committing the awful act of killing the baby. Kim Begley's Laca deftly navigated the character turn from a jealous, unreasonable admirer pushing himself on Jenufa into a truly caring, repentant man in Acts 2 & 3. Jorma Silvasti, who also sang the opposite role of Laca at the Met last winter, played the dumber brother Steva in fine voice.

Still though, I'll mostly remember Karita Mattila from this night. Critics liked the show, too - LA Times, OC Register. Experience The Mattila yourself before the production goes away on Oct 13. In a different role, she'll also be doing the Metropolitan Opera's live movie theater broadcast of Puccini's Manon Lescaut in February. Or listen to her on the web this Saturday, also in Manon Lescaut from San Francisco Opera (find an online station here).

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More catch up blogging, this time on the opera side - Before leaving for New York, I saw LA Opera's production of Beethoven's Fidelio and a concert staging of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov at the Hollywood Bowl, with the LA Phil and soloists from the Mariinsky Theater.

Sat, Sept 8 -- LA Opera's Fidelio was great musically, but not so great on the production side. There was spectacular playing by the orchestra under conductor James Conlon, and there was great singing from Anja Kampe in the title role (a woman who takes on the disguise of a man named Fidelio in order to infiltrate a prison and save her husband, who is being secretly held captive as a political prisoner). The production was dreary in Act 1, then employed cheesy space age projections in Act 2 - projections that moved. To simulate our going underground to visit the hidden prisoner, we move through darkness, tunnels, and crowds of shady figures that brought to mind (comically, to me) the dementors from Harry Potter. Other projections showed extra solders coming down the stairs in the back of the set: ok I get economy in stage design, but projections are just cheesy. Also, in order to use the projections, they kept a scrim over the front of the stage - and even though we could see through the scrim, there was still a sense of separation from the performers. I want to be able to see the performers live and clearly, and having a scrim there cuts you off: why go to a live performance if you're going to watch a screen instead? Might as well go to the movies. But oh my, Conlon and the LA Opera orchestra's playing of the Leonore overture version 3 (during the Act 2 scene shift) - just fantastic. At curtain call, they gave the orchestra a special, very well deserved curtain call on stage. (Fidelio Act 2 photo by Robert Millard/LA Opera)

Thurs, Sept 6 -- Boris Godunov at the Hollywood Bowl was boring. To me. Critics liked the performance more than I did, so it was probably my not being knowledgeable about the opera and also just not being into it (nearly bailed at intermission). Not much actually happens in this opera; most of the time, characters stand and sing about things that happened in the past, then think about it aloud for very long periods of time. It was like a three-hour long, 4 scene monologue. And I didn't get into the music very much, the only musical highpoint being the orchestral Coronation Scene in Act 1. Otherwise, a lot of it was singing text with not much to engage me. Others in the bus on the way back who were more familiar with the opera were talking about how beautiful the music was - maybe once you're more familiar with the music you can appreciate its beauty, but I found it overlong. And then there was the whole thing of being in the Hollywood Bowl. The opera seems much more intimate in scale, so being in an enclosed theater might have made the thing more appealing. Focusing solely on the music here, for one who isn't familiar with Godunov, probably didn't help much for me. Snooze. At least they provided translations on the screen this time! They didn't for The Magic Flute earlier in the summer, so I'm glad they took the effort to do it this time - it helped us at least figure out what was going on.