Praise for Katya Kabanova

Corinne Winters as Katya. Philip Newton photo

"A feverishly powerful emotional experience." - The Seattle Times

"Packs a potent visceral punch both visually and emotionally. This production leaves no doubt why Leoš Janácek, who wrote both Kabanova’s music and libretto, is now considered one of the 20th century’s best composers of opera." - Queen Anne News

"Katya Kabanova is a memorable, thrilling production in every way...Well-conceived tragedy makes you think about human nature in deeper ways while enjoying the challenge of great theater. This production achieves those high goals." - Seattle Gay News

"...a lush, compelling three-act opera with an alluring backstory." - The Stranger

"Anyone dismayed by Seattle Opera’s bare-bones La traviata in January might think “Oh, not again” upon seeing the opening scene of the company’s Katya Kabanova, which opened Saturday—a completely empty black box. But be patient; it fills soon enough, not only with a set (including several pretty and effective projected backdrops) but with pathos and a great deal of ear-grabbing music." - Seattle Weekly 

Joshua Kohl (Kudrjas) and Maya Lahyani (Varvara). Philip Newton photo

"The visuals by Genevieve Blanchett and Mark Howett — combining sets, lighting and digital projections — underscore a basic tension between the lush natural beauty of the surroundings and the emotional ugliness of the Kabanov household...It beckons to a freedom that is beyond reach for Katya."  - The Seattle Times

"What makes Katya’s dilemma even more claustrophobic is the setting. Seattle Opera’s production is set in small town America in the 1950s—the most buttoned-down era in our recent history—when cozy country life was still seen as more American than loose life in the big city. The men wear fedoras and double-breasted suits; the women wear flats and pleated skirts, with their hair in tight curls under tight little hats. Kabanicha looks like a school principal ready to rap knuckles with a wooden ruler. Only Varvara, Kabanicha’s bobby-soxer daughter, displays any sense of freedom, wearing jeans and saddle oxfords, reading movie magazines, and sneaking out through the garden gate to see her boyfriend. She provides the single source of comfort and relief for poor browbeaten Katya." - Seattle Gay News

Victoria Livengood (Kabanicha). Philip Newton photo

"Victoria Livengood, in the critical role of Kabanicha, was perfectly cast. Her voice has a slight vibrato coupled with a sharp edge that perfectly encapsulated the dangerous self-absorption of a relentless matriarch." - Seattle Gay News

"Victoria Livengood was a thoroughly chilling Kabanicha, a master of psychological manipulation who used her dusky low notes to embody the cold-as-dry-ice matriarch."- The Seattle Times

"Stage director Patrick Nolan, production and digital designer Genevieve Blanchett, and lighting and digital designer Mark Howett, all in their Seattle Opera debuts, create a cinematic sensibility to match with the film-score feel of Janácek’s dramatic music." - Queen Anne News

Melody Moore (Katya). Philip Newton photo

"With the platinum gleam of her soprano, Melody Moore, Katya in opening night’s cast, makes these moments captivating."  - Seattle Weekly 

"Melody Moore combined her splendid vocal and theatrical gifts to deeply moving effect. She had full control over her powerful soprano, projecting the high-lying part easily across Janáček’s most tempestuous orchestration and applying exquisite shading and shaping. Moore conveyed Katya’s fear of her locked-up emotions with tremulous beauty, turning her final scene into an ecstatic vision of release that kept a refreshing distance from clichés of operatic madness."  - The Seattle Times

Joseph Dennis (Boris) and Melody Moore (Katya). Philip Newton photo

"Joseph Dennis sang with lyrical refinement." - "The Seattle Times

"Seattle Opera’s not only localized Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s 1921 opera, moving it out of 19th-century Russia, but pushed it forward to the conformist ’50s. The plot translates well ... it’s just the kind of concentrated, no-frills storytelling—a relentless trudge to tragedy—later taken up by successful American opera composers like Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, and Carlisle Floyd." - Seattle Weekly 

Maya Lahyani (Varvara). Philip Newton photo

"Maya Lahyani made an appealingly free-spirited Varvara. As her boyfriend, Kudrjas, Joshua Kohl suggested a hipster rebel who nevertheless cautions Boris to play by the rules."- The Seattle Times

"Sustaining Moore and the rest of the superb cast was the gorgeously moody score performed with eloquence by conductor Oliver Dohnayi and his orchestra, although they occasionally overwhelmed the singers. The Seattle Opera chorus did a lovely job as always of enhancing the action." - Queen Anne News

"Maryland soprano Corinne Winters was vocally secure and dramatically intense, in the challenging role of Katya. Winters conveyed the soul-searing turmoil of a woman with deeply-held religious belief that extra-marital sexual thoughts are mortal sins, yet who accedes to a liaison with Boris while her husband is away." - Opera Warhorses

"As Tichon, Katya’s abusive husband, Nicky Spence’s strong voice subtly conveyed his vacillation between his overbearing mother’s dictates and his wife’s needs, which spur Tichon to anger and heavy drinking." - Queen Anne News

"Texas tenor Scott Quinn was vocally and dramatically effective as Boris, Katya’s seducer." - Opera Warhorses

"... Janáček’s gorgeous, multi-layered music bypasses the rational mind to dramatize the turmoil—the gathering storm—in Katya’s soul. As the conflict deepens and Katya becomes increasingly desperate, you almost feel like your own anxiety is part of the orchestra’s ominous percussion, its haunting, fragmented melodies, and its oppressive sense of doom." - Seattle Gay News

Corinne Winters (Katya). Jacob Lucas photo

A cinematic night at the opera

Seattle Opera's Katya Kabanova - photo by Philip Newton; plus stills from the movies La La Land and All That Heaven Allows. 

By Rebecca Brown 

While everyone else was watching the Oscars on TV, I was sitting on my couch dreamily remembering the most cinematic opera I have ever seen in my life. Seattle Opera’s visually stunning production of Janacek’s 1921 Katya Kabanova is, by turns, as color-drenched as a Douglas Sirk and as black-and-white stark as the graveyard scene David Lean’s David Copperfield. Some of the background settings are as magnificent and lonely as the ones in Shane. Cinema is a perfect analogue for this original production because it’s so much about how we see ourselves and others, about how often we look judgmentally and destroy our very own.

The opening shot - a girl alone on an empty stage, a space constructed for art - morphs into a star dappled sky. I couldn’t help think of the both realistic and fantasy sequence skies in La La Land, beneath which the hopeful artists imagine becoming Hollywood stars or musicians.

A still from the Oscar-award winner La La Land. 

 In Katya, the starry background includes green swirls suggestive of the Northern Lights. You can’t see the Northern lights in LA, but you can from some places in Russia, where “The Storm,” a play from the 1850’s on which the Czech language opera was based, is set. Seattle Opera shifts the action forward a hundred or so years to l950’s America complete with all its miserable conformity, hypocrisy and social pressure.

Melody Moore as Katya. Philip Newton photo

After the solitary Katya dreams beneath the stars, the sections of a white picket fence are assembled across the wide length of the stage in front of her; she’s trapped. When the fence is complete, it’s framed on the left by an apple tree - this place looks as American as apple pie! Old Glory flying near the middle of the fence underscores the squeaky clean patriotism of the place. But the apple tree, of course, is hung with forbidden fruit, and at the far right of the fence are a couple of garbage cans. Not all will stay tidy in paradise.

Victoria Livengood (Kabanicha), Corinne Winters (Katya) and Nicky Spence (Tichon). Jacob Lucas photo

There’s not much original in this story of marital love gone stale, illicit love, the corrupting love of societal convention, etc., in Katya Kabanova, which is like a lot of movies. But part of why we go to these movies and plays and operas is to be reminded that our struggles as humans are common and that they continue despite the age in which we live and the medium in which they are told.

Scott Quinn (Boris) and Corinne Winters (Katya). Philip Newton photo

That this production can both so astutely translate Janacek’s opera to our age and connect it to the movies we watch as recently as now, is a testament to the vitality and invention of this company. Bravo Aidan Lang for commissioning this production. More please!

Rebecca Brown is the author of a dozen books  - fiction and nonfiction – published in the US and abroad. She lives and works in Seattle. See her opera reviews for The Stranger here. 

AIDAN LANG INTRODUCES KATYA KABANOVA

Listen to or read this downloadable podcast by General Director Aidan Lang. Katya Kabanova, the 1921 masterpiece by Leoš Janáček, comes to Seattle for the first time this February (seven performances through March 11). Aidan explains his enthusiasm for the works of this great Czech composer, the themes of Katya Kabanova, and creative process behind our new production.

Hello, everyone, this is Aidan Lang, speaking to you now about Leoš Janáček’s Katya Kabanova.

I’ve often said that Janáček is a wonderful opera composer for first-time opera-goers, and people look at me as if I’m slightly mad on that. The traditional way of thinking is you take a newcomer to Bohème or to Butterfly.

Now, those two are great masterpieces, and are performed all around the world frequently. But for people who are opera-wary, or haven’t experienced an opera, they are likely to come to the theater more informed by the way they digest entertainment through film, through television. And the great advantage of the works of Janáček is they have the sort of directness and the emotional punch that you see today on long-narrative TV and in cinema. A first-timer will find a far more immediate bond with a work like Katya than they would with a more romantically-weighted work like La bohème.

OPERA Timeless & Timely

This blog post is based on a lecture Jonathan Dean gave as part of Seattle Opera’s adult education series at Seattle University on October 18, 2016. Next up in the series: on Tuesday, November 8 at 7:00 PM, Aidan Lang hosts a panel discussion with the cast and creative team of As One: composer Laura Kaminsky, co-librettist Mark Campbell, co-librettist Kimberly Reed via Skype, director L. Zane Jones, and conductor John Keene. Mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven and baritone Jorell Williams will also join in the conversation and perform excerpts from As One.

Our opera industry today is built upon a handful of paradoxes. Opera has always been a tug-of-war between sound and sense, between music and word; today, the auditory and visual sides of the opera experience are sometimes struggling partners. (Should we cast for voice or look?)

A Janáček opera with Puccini inspiration

In February and March, 2017, Janáček's opera Katya Kabanova comes to Seattle Opera for the first time. While they may come from different composers and different places in the vast operatic universe, Katya and Cio-Cio San originate from a similar musical source. 

Did you know that composer Leoš Janáček was inspired by Puccini? In fact, his sixth opera, Katya Kabanova  is partially based on Puccini's Madam Butterfly (and a Mrs. Stosslova, 38 years younger than him and married.) He met her while on holiday with his wife in 1917. This was a one sided passionate relationship on his part which resulted in over 700 letters. She was the inspiration for additional operas as well. She never understood him or his work.

Katya, "one of my most tender works," the composer wrote,  premiered in Brno in November 1921. The score contrasts extreme beauty with fateful oppression to wonderful emotional and passionate effect. The tragic libretto portrays a woman driven to despair and a tragic fate by her husband and monstrous mother-in-law. The result is a deeply moving, intensely lyrical work, as engaging in the beauty of the vocal and orchestral writing as in its story – which also revealed the tragedy of Slavic provincial life, of which Janácek was only too well aware.

No wonder he was inspired by Butterfly. It has a similar effect.

Tickets & info: seattleopera.org/katya
#SOKatya