Katya Kabanova, Barbican — Simon Rattle elicits majestic playing from the London Symphony Orchestra

Although Simon Rattle has never held a music director’s post in an opera house, he has amassed a considerable amount of experience in opera. Guest conducting in Aix-en-Provence, Amsterdam, Berlin, Glyndebourne, London, New York, Paris and Salzburg has given him opportunities to deepen his knowledge of the opera composers closest to his heart.

Prime among these is Leoš Janáček. It is a mark of how the operatic landscape has changed that, while Charles Mackerras stood almost alone in the postwar years waving the flag for Janáček in the west, conductors now put his operas at the centre of their programmes. Rattle clearly feels more at home with Janáček than he did at first with Wagner, or even now with Italian opera, the traditional core of the repertoire.

The same goes for orchestras, which have become impressively adept at Janáček’s idiosyncratic style. This concert performance of Katya Kabanova with the London Symphony Orchestra revealed a level of precision and subtlety in the playing that would have eluded most orchestras half a century ago.

Since his years with the Berlin Philharmonic, Rattle’s way with Janáček has become richer and deeper in sound, more majestic, weightier. One might miss the transparency of sound that Mackerras revealed, but in its place came much heartfelt shaping of phrases and a spark of electricity in the detail. Lighting up every twist and turn of Janáček’s music probably comes as second nature to Rattle, a conductor drawn to living every moment to the full, rather than charting a work’s long-term architectural design.

If the intention was to show off the LSO’s quality in this music, that was comprehensively achieved, and not only because having the orchestra on stage gave it a dominant place in the sound picture. The singers did well to hold their own, especially when Rattle let rip at the close of the second act or during the thunderstorm of the third.

As in the recent Royal Opera production, the title role was sung by Amanda Majeski. Although she suggests little of Katya’s intense, bottled-up frustration, it would not be easy to find the role better sung, warm, sensitive, always projecting over the orchestra and, most importantly, glowing with lyrical beauty.

By and large the cast offered an experienced line-up. Katarina Dalayman was an incisive Kabanicha. Simon O’Neill, more often seen in Wagner, showed that he can double successfully as a Janáček tenor, unfazed by the awkward heights of Boris’s role. Magdalena Kožená was a vivid Varvara and Andrew Staples avoided caricature as Katya’s weak-willed husband, Tichon. In general, they made less impact as characters than in a staged production, though Pavlo Hunka, a late replacement as lecherous old Dikoj, made up for that somewhat.

★★★★☆

To January 13, barbican.org.uk
Streamed on Marquee TV on February 2