Garsington.(Sarka)

Based at the late Lady Ottoline Morrell's former home, Garsington Manor, not far from Oxford, Garsington Opera often has presented rarities, including the U.K. premieres of works by Haydn, Rossini and Strauss. In its 2002 season--its fourteenth--it was Janacek's turn; his early, nationalist opera, Sarka, received its first British staging (June 24), on a double bill with the later, almost equally rare Osud (Fate).

Sarka was the composer's first stage work, written in 1887-88, when he was in his early thirties. It's a setting of a verse libretto intended for Dvorak, who never used it, but the subject was well known in Czech artistic circles at the time: Smetana wrote a symphonic poem on it, part of his cycle Ma Vlast (My Homeland). It also provided the theme for the best-known opera of Janacek's compatriot, Zdenek Fibich (1850-1900).

Sarka is a warrior maiden who lures to his doom the knight Ctirad, champion of a group of male warriors who are determined to end the rival power of the female band. An ambush is prepared, in which Sarka is tied to a tree by her comrades, ostensibly as a punishment. As expected, Ctirad discovers her, but--contrary to plan--the two find themselves irresistibly drawn to one another, and there is a brief love scene. After Ctirad frees her, the trap is sprung and the women fall upon him and kill him. In the last of three short acts, Ctirad's body is borne back to the court, whereupon Sarka appears and takes her own life on top of his funeral pyre.

This epic of high romance was of a type popular at the time but which Janacek himself shortly would move away from. He wrote the piece without obtaining the librettist's permission, which was refused (at least at first). So he put away the score, only to recover it in 1918 when, with a pupil to assist him in the orchestration, he prepared it for performance. But not until 1925, in Brno, was Sarka finally staged, and it hasn't been heard much since.

The opera turns out to be curious but worthwhile. Though some sections are post-Wagnerian, others are couched in the Czech nationalist style of Dvorak and Smetana; Janacek's revision of 1918-19 infuses that style with his own mature idiom, to a surprising degree. There are rousing choruses and grand ensembles, and the central love-scene between Sarka and Ctirad is memorably passionate.

Garsington did the work proud, importing heroic-voiced Slovak tenor Ludovit Ludha to sing Ctirad, with equally rich-toned English soprano Susan Stacey delivering a bold, fiery Sarka. In the supporting roles of Lumir and Premysl, warrior and warrior leader respectively, Lorenzo Carola and Wyn Pencarreg were fully present and correct, but Sarka is essentially a two-horse race.

Osud, written after Jenufa, from 1903-07, but never performed in Janacek's lifetime, is much closer to the operatic realism popular in its day, even if a couple of plot events strain credulity. It tells of the composer Zivny, whose insane mother-in-law accidentally kills her daughter Mila in a struggle, then falls immediately to her own death. Years later, playing through his own partly autobiographical opera, Zivny collapses and dies as lightning strikes the classroom where he teaches. Despite this sequence of apparently random disasters, Janacek's score is immediately appealing, with some entrancing waltz music for the spa scene of Act I and a soaring apotheosis for the unlucky composer's death scene. Some potentially ludicrous moments were minimized in Olivia Fuchs's canny production: after killing her daughter, the unhinged mother merely retired sulkily to her wheelchair, instead of falling off the balcony with Mila.