FROM AROUND THE WORLD: CARDIFF.(Brief Article)

Welsh National Opera's new Kata Kabanova (New Theatre, May 19) marked the last production to be launched by the company's departing musical director, Carlo Rizzi, who is leaving after ten successful seasons. A high proportion of his work with the Welsh has been memorable, and this performance (sung in the original Czech) was among his best interpretations, conveying in full the score's powerful emotional surges, its sharp-edged lyricism and the sheer punchiness of its orchestration.

Katie Mitchell, who gave the company an admired Jenufa a couple of years back, directed, with Vicki Mortimer in charge of design and Paule Constable responsible for lighting. The setting was updated to the middle decades of the twentieth century -- an odd move, since the semi-feudal relationships around which the plot is structured would by then have lost their rigidity, to be replaced by different (and arguably worse) social structures. Precisely what were these merchants doing in the Communist period? Nevertheless, the performances she drew from her principals and the detail and cogency of the interaction between them made the drama profoundly involving and immediate.

The settings too were carefully planned to complement the score's finely realized sense of atmosphere, the opening and closing scenes taking place in a realistic boat-station waiting room on the banks of the Volga, the fatal love tryst between Kata and Boris (paired in double duet with the happy-go-lucky affair between Varvara and Kudryas) in a poetically conceived nocturnal garden leading down to the river.

The sixty-five-year-old composer began this opera in response to his unrequited love for the much younger Kamila Stosslova, whose inspiration is apparent in a whole group of pieces from his last decade. He wrote to her that "the chief character ... is a woman soft by nature. A breeze would carry her away, let alone the storm that gathers over her!" No better physical embodiment of the Kata of Janacek's imagination could be found than the slight, darkly pretty Nuccia Focile, whose residence in Wales allows her to grace the company's productions on a regular ...