Claustrophobic, pole-axing Janáček, rare early Puccini

Katya Kabanova at Grange Park Opera, Edgar at Opera Holland Park

Doomed lovers: Thomas Atkins (Boris), Natalya Romaniw (Katya) Picture © Marc Brenner

Say what you like about Wasfi Kani - she has both admirers and detractors - but she deserves huge credit for helping to establish three of England’s summer opera companies. In her early days at Garsington she worked initially as conductor, later as artistic advisor. She then founded Grange Park Opera (GPO) in Hampshire, where she built her first theatre in the ruins of Northington Grange (now occupied by the Grange Festival). More recently she uprooted GPO, building a new, larger theatre in the grounds of West Horsley Place, the Surrey pile of the late Bamber Gascoine, where her artistic choices have been bold, including an ambitious Janáček series.

It began in 2017 with a staging of Jenufa that Katie Mitchell had originally mounted for Welsh National Opera. This was followed in 2022 by a David Pountney production of The Adventures of Mr Brouček. Now comes David Alden’s brand new Katya Kabanova, with Natalya Romaniw and Susan Bullock singing the two pivotal female roles on stage for the first time. As compelling as both were in Jenufa in 2017, they are even more so in the later opera, in which their characters are locked in a battle for the pusillanimous heart and feeble soul of the merchant Tichon Kabanov. Romaniw’s Katya professes undying love for this fearful ‘mummy’s boy’, while Bullock’s Kabanicha rules the household with a rod of iron, jealous of her daughter-in-law and determined to humiliate her. When Tichon goes away for a business trip, Katya falls for the charms of the shallow Boris Grigorievich. Then, in a fit of remorse, she publicly confesses her infidelity - to the satisfaction of Kabanicha - and drowns herself in the Volga River.