Though he’s always likely to be best known for his choral music and popular carols, John Joubert’s output includes concertos, two symphonies and no less than seven operas. Jane Eyre, completed in 1997, is the most recent of them, and this concert performance was its official world premiere, recorded live for Somm Records and due for release on disc next spring to mark the composer’s 90th birthday.
Joubert and his librettist Kenneth Birkin originally conceived their adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel in three acts. But for this performance, conducted by Kenneth Woods, with the English Symphony Orchestra, the score had been reduced to two, each with three scenes. Inevitably they concentrate on the significant episodes in Jane’s story, trusting a bit too much on the audience’s prior knowledge of the original text to supply narrative continuity, and leaving questions about the opera’s dramatic shape and coherence unresolved.
But the best of Joubert’s score does transcend those structural weaknesses. The influences in his music are clear, without ever seeming remotely derivative. There are echoes of Britten’s operas and Debussy’s Pelléas, but also of Wagner and perhaps Janáček too, yet all are fused into an entirely personal idiom.
It’s hard to imagine Jane Eyre working convincingly on stage – the size of the cast, with 16 named roles, most only appearing in a single scene, isn’t very practical either. But as a timely reminder of the melodic strengths and potency of Joubert’s music this fine performance, with April Fredrick as Jane, David Stout as Rochester and Mark Milhofer as the Reverend St John Rivers, certainly did the trick.
