Quiet power of maternal love Financial Times 16-March-09 by Andrew Clark Janáček, a small-town late 19th-century music teacher, was the first feminist composer. Jenůfa, his most conventional success, is one of the few truly feminist operas. In spite of their human shortcomings, acknowledged by themselves, the opera's two leading characters are superior to all the males. Jenůfa and her foster mother accept humiliation and rise above it - on an epic scale that transcends their narrow village surroundings. But neither Janáček nor Gabriela Preissovà, on whose play the opera is based, set out to prove this. Preissovà was intent on social realism, while Janáček composed Jenůfa as a release for - and from - turmoil of watching his daughter die. The best productions, of which English National Opera's is one, make us understand the emotional torture of the two leading women without making us aware of being manipulated. David Alden's 2006 staging has limitations - chiefly the unhappy match between late communist-era visuals and the nascent capitalist society described by the plot. Where Alden scores is in his drawing-out of credible acting performances, not just in the rough-and-tumble of the Act One ensembles and the bitter social proprieties of Act Three, but also in the fraught triangular relationships of a second act dominated by Charles Edwards' claustrophobic, quasi-Expressionist set. Alden's direction finds fruition in Eivind Gullberg Jensen's ideally buoyant, rhythmically alert, liberated conducting, which has the orchestra scurrying off in nervous flurries of sound and tracing Janáček's spasmic ostinatos and pent-up climaxes with lyrical finesse: a sensational house debut for the young Norwegian. Amanda Roocroft's Jenůfa is so truthfully acted that the post-natal gait in Act Two could be for real: the tears are. But it's her transformation from young-womanly naivety through physical/emotional frailty to quiet self-determination that defines her performance, as much as her open-voiced singing. Robert Brubaker is the magnificently rough-hewn Laca, Tom Randle a believably dissolute Steva, and all the comprimarios are good. The one weak link is Michaela Martens' Kostelnicka: she sings well, but the character is basted on rather than felt from within, so that the raw edges never tell. All told, though, an evening to remember. [back to Jenůfa reviews]