Janáček The Excursions of Mr Brouček

Peter Hoare (Mr Brouček), Lucy Crowe, Aleš Briscein, Gyula Orendt, Lukas Zeman, Doubravka Novotná, Linard Vrielink, Stephan Rügamer, Arttu Kataja.

London Symphony Orchestra, Tenebrae
Sir Simon Rattle

LSO Live: LSO0915
https://lsolive.lso.co.uk/

Leoš Janáček never did anything by halves, but even by his standards, The Excursions of Mr Brouček is a peculiar beast. Adapted from Svatopluk Čech's satirical novels, it follows a boozy, small-minded Prague landlord who, through no virtue of his own, is flung first to the Moon and then back through time to the Hussite wars of the 15th century — where his cowardice earns him a death sentence, delivered, with pleasing absurdity, inside a beer barrel.

I went in braced for a curiosity best admired at arm's length. I
came out converted.

Rattle draws out the score's mischief with a clarity that lets Janáček's invention speak for itself — his trademark short-breathed motifs and unmistakably Czech melodic turns, the sudden lurches between the celestial and the earthbound. It is a performance that trusts the material to be funny, rather than straining to make it so, and the results glow. Tenor Peter Hoare is a superbly unheroic Brouček, blustering and cowardly in equal measure, while on the Moon he encounters Aleš Briscein's poetic painter and Lucy Crowe's luminous lunar goddess, sung with an effortless top register that makes the rest of the cast sound positively terrestrial.

Managing a company doubling up as moon-dwellers, Hussite soldiers and Prague townsfolk could easily tip into confusion, but every singer here carves out a distinct character even as the score hurtles between them. The LSO responds to Janáček's jagged rhythms and orchestral colour with real bite — woodwind crisp and characterful throughout, strings full-bodied without ever turning soupy — while the odder corner of the scoring, not least Bert Van Troyen's bagpipes and Catherine Edwards's organ is given its full, eccentric due.

Tenebrae, directed by Nigel Short, brings the same relish to the choral writing, catching the work's wit as readily as its drama.

Nigel Simeone's booklet essay is a model of the genre, tracing the score's range from the alien murmurs of the moon music to what he calls "a tone poem in miniature" — the glowing orchestral interlude that carries the action back down to Prague.

It would be easy to file Brouček away as a Janáček footnote, the one even his admirers tend to skip. Rattle and his forces make a compelling case that it shouldn't be. A comic opera, treated with real seriousness, and all the better for it.