Classical Music

I remind Catherine Malfitano of her petite, Italianate Zerlina in a Covent Garden ‘Don Giovanni’ nearly 30 years ago. She vividly recalls how the Don (Ruggero Raimondi) nearly descended to hell prematurely when one leg slipped through the gaps in the boards ‘up to his – er – groin’. Only quick thinking and a hefty yank from Donna Anna (Gundula Janowitz) saved him from the underworld before his time.

Malfitano would remember that. It’s part of the theatricality she embodies, a stage awareness combined with psychological probing that makes her an opera animal – not just a singer but, now in her 50s, a teacher and director. Feature continues

Currently she’s gracing ENO’s smash hit production of Janácek’s ‘Jenufa’, updated from the ninteenth-century Moravian village to austere post-Soviet starkness, where self-important small-town dignitaries (the mayor, his wife, the mill foreman) emerge with the distinctive characterisation of early Czech films by Forman or Menzel.

Not that lust and infanticide featured in those gentle comedies. Malfitano plays the Kostenicka (sexton’s widow) whose twisted love and sense of honour prompts her to drown her stepdaughter’s illegitimate baby. ‘It’s not easy to play,’ admits the American soprano. ‘A child murderer is the last frontier of humanity.’ She remembers seeing the great Leonie Rysanek sing the role. ‘I thought: I want to do that one day. She’s compelling, horrific. I fell in love with this character.’

Malfitano was offered Jenufa herself by the New York Met. ‘I turned it down. It was stupid of me.’ But she confesses her attraction to opera’s ‘darker characters’. ‘Jenufa is so much of light, almost hard to take. She can be generous and forgiving. She gives the Kostenicka courage to face her crime and perhaps have a shred of forgiveness from God.’ Very Janácek, this conviction – quoted in his Dostoevsky-based prison-camp opera ‘From the House of the Dead’ – that every creature, however degraded, has the spark of God in him.

This ‘Jenufa’, co-produced with Houston and Washington, has already opened in the States. It marks director David Alden’s return to the Coli in top form, with eloquent stage groupings and hauntingly evocative lighting including those expressionist movie shadows that are an Alden trademark. Above all, it makes living human beings out of loving, put-upon Jenufa (Amanda Roocroft, in tremendous vocal form and breathtakingly touching) and her tormented stepmother. The character’s a challenge, something Malfitano, referring slightly warningly to her Sicilan-Irish-Russian forbears, relishes.