The late operas of Leos Janacek are staples at major houses in the United States and Europe, but this Czech master's dramatically potent scores have had very few opportunities to gain traction in Boston. Finally this season, for the first time in its history, Boston Lyric Opera found a way forward with a single Janacek work. Friday night at the Shubert Theatre, the company offered the local stage premiere of "Katya Kabanova."
BLO is to be applauded for mounting what may be only the second professional staging of any Janacek work in local operatic history. And I wish I could say that newcomers to this music were given a taste of the composer's stage work at its most compelling. But unfortunately I left concerned that this production, directed by Tim Albury and imported from the UK's Opera North, might send both "Katya" and its creator back into local hibernation.
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Premiered in 1921 and adapted from Ostrovsky's "The Storm," "Katya Kabanova" is set in a small village on the banks of Volga River, and centers on the tragic plight of its title character, who longs for escape from a strained marriage and a suffocating domestic life. After acting on her fantasies and finding fleeting bliss with another villager named Boris, Katya is wracked with guilt, confesses her affair, and takes her own life.
Janacek's riveting score is poised on the knife's edge between late-Romanticism and early-modernism, but the marvel of this opera is also in the deep well of sympathy Janacek conveys for his heroine. The music brims with compassion for her plight, and the vocal writing for Katya in particular — by turns tender, anguished, and telegraphing a deep longing for a freedom just out of reach — sweeps the listener into her inner world.
Crucially, however, Janacek's melodies are drawn from the rhythms and intonation of the Czech language itself, which is why it is such a risky decision to stage this work not in the Czech original but in English translation, as BLO chose to do. On Friday you could feel the disconnect. "You know I'm married!" Katya sings. It's not just the generically melodramatic language that distracts. What's lost in translation is in fact the integrity of this opera's original sound world.
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Advocates for opera in translation often emphasize the gain it can bring to a work's dramatic immediacy, but that aspect felt insufficiently tapped in this production. Two critical moments — when Katya first voices her fantasies of escape to her husband's foster-sister Varvara, and when she confesses her adultery — transpire at the rear of the stage, their impact thereby diminished. The austere sets and grim costumes are presumably meant to emphasize the unrelenting bleakness of village life, but they do so without real resonance with the tension, the poetry, or the blind, desperate hope at the heart of this score.
Among the principal singers, soprano Elaine Alvarez bravely threw herself into the title role and by the final act ably conveyed the intensity of Katya's roiling inner world, but an intermittently forced quality in her upper range did not help her enlist a listener's sympathies for her plight. Sandra Piques Eddy for the most part sang Varvara with an appealing style and agility. Raymond Very sang Boris, Katya's lover, with a sweet-toned tenor alert to the sympathetic qualities Janacek writes into this part, helping us understand Katya's flight into his kindness. Alan Schneider was solid as Tichon, Katya's meek husband dominated by his tyrannical widowed mother, Kabanicha (here a capable Elizabeth Byrne).
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There were many times on Friday when one wished for more vibrant sound coming from the pit, to weld this opera together and cast its full spell. What one could hear of Friday's orchestral playing, under David Angus, was disappointing. The sonic profile overall was thin, the ensemble work itself sometimes patchy, and the bloom in the sound — a quality so crucial in Janacek — nonexistent. In this last regard, the acoustics of the Shubert Theater continue to be an albatross around this company's neck.
BLO deserves much credit for finally programming this essential composer, despite the fact that he is apparently a tough local sell. But coming on the heels of the company's excellent off-site production of Frank Martin's "Le Vin Herbe," this return to the Shubert emphasized more than ever the structural challenges BLO faces in trying to build — and sustain — artistic momentum in such an inhospitable home.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.