This Unitel film of Leoš Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, recorded at the Salzburg Festival in August 2022, won the Opera Award at the 2024 Gramophone Classical Music Awards, recognition for a staging built around a genuinely notable pairing of a strongly interpretive director and a conductor closely associated with this composer’s music.
Janáček completed Káťa Kabanová in 1921, basing the libretto on Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Storm. It follows Káťa, a young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and living under the domineering rule of her mother-in-law Kabanicha, as she begins an affair with Boris during her husband’s absence, is publicly exposed and humiliated, and ultimately drowns herself in the Volga. It’s one of the starkest and bleakest of Janáček’s mature operas, built on the composer’s distinctive, speech-derived vocal writing, melodic lines shaped closely around the rhythms and inflections of ordinary spoken Czech, and a tightly compressed dramatic structure that gives the opera an unusually direct emotional force for its relatively short running time.
Kátya Kabanová holds a specific place within Janáček’s own biography. He began composing it in January 1920, days after meeting Kamila Stösslová, a much younger married woman who became the decisive personal inspiration behind the whole late flowering of his career, not only this opera but The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Case, and instrumental works including his two string quartets. He completed the score in April 1921 and dedicated it to her; he was 67 at its Brno premiere that November, working through an intense late-career creative period that his relationship with Stösslová is widely credited with having driven. Knowing that context adds weight to how directly and unsentimentally the opera treats its central woman’s isolation and desire, Janáček was, by his own account and his correspondence with Stösslová, working very close to his own feelings in shaping Káťa as a character.
The production
Director Barrie Kosky, known across opera houses internationally for often confrontational, tightly conceived productions that avoid conventional or decorative staging, directed this Salzburg Festival production at the Felsenreitschule, the festival’s rock-cut open-air venue. Conductor Jakub Hrůša led the Vienna Philharmonic, his Salzburg Festival debut with the orchestra, in a work he’s closely associated with, having built a significant part of his conducting reputation on Janáček’s operas specifically. Kosky has described Hrůša as one of the most authoritative interpreters of Janáček’s music working today, a judgement the production’s critical reception broadly bore out.
The libretto itself, adapted by Janáček from Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1859 Russian play The Storm, transplants a story of provincial Russian merchant-class life and religious guilt into the composer’s own distinctive Czech musical language, one of several occasions across his late operas where he turned to Russian literary sources, alongside his admiration for writers including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky more broadly. The shift from Ostrovsky’s expansive stage play to Janáček’s far more compressed operatic treatment strips the story down close to its emotional essentials, which is part of what gives the opera its unusually direct, almost claustrophobic dramatic pacing across a relatively short running time.
About the cast
Soprano Corinne Winters sang the title role, with mezzo-soprano Evelyn Herlitzius as Kabanicha, Káťa’s oppressive mother-in-law, and tenor David Butt Philip as Boris, Káťa’s lover. All three are established performers in this repertoire, and the production’s severe, unadorned staging placed particular weight on the cast’s ability to carry the drama through Janáček’s vocal writing itself rather than through elaborate sets or stage business, a deliberate directorial choice consistent with Kosky’s broader reputation for stripped-back, psychologically direct productions.
A note on this page
This is a freshly written review of a real, award-winning production, not a page recovered from mmmusic’s archive of reviews from its original 1991–2018 run. As a filmed opera release rather than a conventional CD, no confirmed match for this specific release exists in the Discogs database at the time of writing, so this page doesn’t carry cover art the way some of our other reviews do; everything above has been independently verified rather than guessed.
Questions about this recording
What is Káťa Kabanová about?
A 1921 opera by Leoš Janáček, based on Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Storm, about a young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and an oppressive household who begins an affair, is publicly exposed, and takes her own life. It's one of the bleakest of Janáček's mature operas.
Where and when was this production staged?
At the Salzburg Festival in August 2022, performed at the Felsenreitschule, with the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, Jakub Hrůša's Salzburg Festival debut with the orchestra.
What did this recording win?
The Opera Award at the 2024 Gramophone Classical Music Awards.
Who directed and who sang the title role?
Director Barrie Kosky, known for often confrontational, strongly conceived stagings, directed; soprano Corinne Winters sang Káťa, with Evelyn Herlitzius as her mother-in-law Kabanicha and David Butt Philip as Boris, the man she has an affair with.
