Aigul Akhmetshina / Rezensionen

The set looks airy and minimal, Káťa’s sense of imprisonment and desire for freedom achieved by Alessandro Carletti’s intense use of lighting and high white walls that shut out the world. Three standard visual motifs, drawn from references in the libretto, are brought into play: bird, cage and angel. Magritte’s disturbing birdcage paintings, one of which he pointedly called The Therapist, come to mind. By the end, these symbols have multiplied to the point of distraction. This might irritate more had musical standards not been so outstanding in every quarter, steered by Glyndebourne’s music director, Robin Ticciati.

Michieletto’s production is symbolic and psychological first and foremost. The white set designs by Paolo Fantin suggest an abstract dream space – there is no village or river, only the interior of Kat’a’s mind. Their acute angles are redolent of the kinds of vitrine-like structures that so fascinated Francis Bacon in his paintings; these walls close in on Kat’a at the end of Act one, trapping her in the room with Kabanicha, which then ingeniously segues uninterrupted into the beginning of Act two.

The Italian director Damiano Michieletto put himself in the critical doghouse with his Covent Garden production of Guillaume Tell earlier this year, thanks to a rape scene which gave enormous offence. But his crime was a matter of tone: in an otherwise stylised production, the aggressively in-your-face naturalism of that scene was grotesquely misplaced.

In Damiano Michieletto’s new production of this famous double bill, the stories are presented straightforwardly and the tragedies perfectly defined. Among the singers, soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek is a standout