Jenufa

Leoš Janácek’s third opera, with its echoes of folk music from the composer’s native Moravia, was his first real success and got the name “Moravian national opera”. Besides

this, Janácek’s music has a special quality: while it explores psychological extremes leading to violence and infanticide and lays bare characters’ emotions in an unsparing manner,

no one is judged. Jenufa has a special relationship with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden: when it premiered in Berlin in 1924, its success on the German stage was assured until nowadays. “Rattle reveals a dynamic understanding of Janácek’s musical language in a reading that’s urgent, unsentimental and richly flavoured” (bachtrack.com). The FAZ described the production as “a beguiling mixture of speaking articulation and tonal roundness.”