Let's get the main complaint out of the way first. The cast for Welsh National Opera's very fine new Katya Kabanova does not contain a single native Czech speaker, and I would guess that the production will not encounter many more in the audience in Cardiff or during its tour.
Yet Janacek's searing study in repression and intolerance is being sung in Czech, distancing 99.9% of those who see it from the terrible events that it portrays. It is either misplaced purism or pure operatic snobbery, and a disservice to a staging whose carefully observed detail and crisply delineated relationships deserve to make maximum emotional impact.
Katie Mitchell's second Janacek production for the Welsh is a far more satisfying affair than her Jenufa for the company two seasons ago. It shares a designer, Vicki Mortimer, with that earlier show, and there is a family resemblance in the cool, uncluttered interiors of the sets, and the downplaying of any sense of the outdoors. But this time everything seems more focused. The mild updating of the action in the costumes (from the 1860s of the original to some time between the wars) is uncontroversial, and the switched locales - centred on a boat station on the banks of the Volga - are perfectly valid. There is still no escaping Katya's tragedy, that of a free spirit mired in the suffocating conventions of middle-class provincial life.
At the centre of everything is Nuccia Focile's Katya. She is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the start, clinging desperately to her husband Tikhon (Peter Hoare) as he prepares to leave on the journey that she knows will bring catastrophe. Her tone is tight, slightly edgy to begin, yet grows steadily in amplitude and warmth through the opera, blossoming in her declarations of love for Boris (Ian Storey), and becoming deeply affecting in her final guilt-ridden monologue.
Her anti-pole is Suzanne Murphy's Kabanicha, the mother-in-law from hell who dotes on her son, feverishly brushing his suit while he is saying his goodbyes to Katya, covertly smoking a cigarette when alone with Dikoj (Alan Fairs), and always cocooning her hypocrisy in glacial calm. Claire Bradshaw's flighty, impulsive Varvara is equally well conceived. Mitchell draws a web of guilt-wracked relationships between all of the protagonists that is totally convincing. Only Carlo Rizzi's conducting is less than ideal. His broad-brush approach lacks the buoyancy and precision the score needs; with everything else so perceptive, it's a shame his contribution is approximate.
• Until May 30. Box office: 029-2087 8889. Then touring to Southampton, Oxford, Llandudno and Bristol.
