Humans consist mostly of water. Dvořák’s nymph, Rusalka, who gives her name to the Czech composer’s ninth and finest opera, is all water. To the man who swims in the forest lake where she resides, she is merely another aqueous ripple. Her only way to win him is to become human. In the pretty trappings of a Slavic fairy story, Rusalka (1901) is a shattering tale of the danger of trying to be other than we are. To an audience today it is also a fable about tending the planet we live in. Without hammering the issues, all these elements united in the Royal Opera’s elegant, at times minimal, new staging, conducted by Semyon Bychkov and co-directed, in their main-stage debuts, by Ann Yee and Natalie Abrahami.
From the outset, orchestra tugging and teasing at the sad opening melody, indications were that this would be a musically engrossing event. Bychkov, among other roles, is music director of the Czech Philharmonic. His pre-eminence in responding to Dvořák’s folk-inspired rhythms and modes is never in doubt. Casting was luxurious: the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian versatile and affecting in the title role, the British tenor David Butt Philip an intelligent and musically formidable Prince, with Aleksei Isaev (Vodnik), Sarah Connolly (Ježibaba) and Emma Bell (the Duchess) leading the supporting ensemble. In the opera’s most famous moment, the song to the moon, Grigorian showed all her vocal colours, with the orchestra wrapping itself delicately round every phrase, each instrument – sensuous harp, throbbing horn, melancholy clarinet – casting its own shaft of light.
