Janáček Kát’a Kabanová Royal Opera House

Janáček Kát’a Kabanová in a new production by Richard Jones, conducted by Edward Gardner at the Royal Opera House reviewed by Claire Seymour in Opera Today :

"How important is ‘context’, in opera? Or, ‘symbol’? How does one balance the realism of a broad social milieu with the expressionistic intensity of an individual’s psychological torment and fracture?

I’m not sure that Richard Jones’s new production of Leoš Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová addresses, or solves, these questions, but it certainly made me reflect upon them."......"Having stirred up so many questions, how fortunate Jones is to have American soprano Amanda Majeski to push them from our mind. In her house and role debut, Majeski gives such heartfelt commitment to the role of Kát’a that one worries how she can come back down from the emotional peaks and precipices that she scales in her performance".