He may have completed his term as the London Symphony Orchestra’s music director (he’s now conductor emeritus) but Simon Rattle’s Janáček project continues apace. Their concert performance of Káťa Kabanová at London’s Barbican Centre was my operatic highlight of 2023, making this recording on the orchestra’s LSO Live label a souvenir of a very special occasion.

When Káťa Kabanová premiered in 1921, Janáček was in the full throes of his infatuation with Kamilla Stösslová, a happily married woman 40 years his junior. It’s hard not to see the composer working through some of his romantic fantasies in his adaption of Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1859 play The Storm. Play and opera centre around Kat’a, a married woman living in a claustrophobic, bourgeois township and caught between two men, each of them weak in different ways. Tichon, her mild-mannered, alcoholic husband is bullied by his mother Kabanicha into humiliating his wife in public. Boris, nephew of the heartless merchant Dikoj, is afraid to run off with her because his uncle controls his allowance. By the time he...