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Opera

A devastating Jenufa - if you could hear it

Plus: David McVicar kills Glyndebourne’s touring Entfuhrung by kindness

5 December 2015

9:00 AM

5 December 2015

9:00 AM

Jenufa

Opera North on tour

Die Entführung aus dem Serail

Glyndebourne on tour

About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and whispered, ‘They’re singing in English!’ And so they were, in Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes’s translation. Janacek was obsessed with the shapes and intonations of speech; for a non-Czech speaker, a first-rate singing translation is really the only way to make Jenufa strike home with anything like the immediacy and realism he intended.

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