"Director: Christopher Marthaler"

• Janacek: Katia Kabanova --Salzburg Festival | DVD | (01/07/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  With its overt love interest and focus on individual isolation, Katia Kabanova is the first of the four operas that crowned the productive last decade of Leos Janacek (1854-1928). The operatic idioms of Dvorak and Verdi are transmuted through his singular soundworld, whose vocal lines convey subtle speech inflexions and whose orchestral writing has a keen pathos and surging emotional intensity. Christoph Marthaler's production for the 1998 Salzburg Festival updates the provincial Russia of the 1850s to that of the 1990s, a decaying tenement block whose inhabitants live out a futile existence. It neither enhances nor undermines the music, in which Angela Denoke's wan Katia gradually gains in conviction, culminating in a touching "mad scene" and ill-fated reconciliation with her lover Boris. David Kuebler is powerful in this role, while Jane Henschel is characterful but lightweight as Kabanicha (mother-in-law) and Hubert Delamboye sympathetic as Katia's put-upon husband Tichon. Sylvain Cambreling, an experienced opera conductor, directs the Czech Philharmonic skilfully and with flair. On the DVD: Katia Kabanova arrives on disc with a 16:9 aspect ratio that captures the many oblique camera angles and perspective shifts; and sound in LPCM Stereo, Dolby 5.1 and DTS options. Subtitles are in five European languages, and there are 29 access points. There are no special features, apart from the regular TDK trailer, but the booklet has a useful, if generalised synopsis of the opera.--Richard Whitehouse