The concert performances of opera classics by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Center and their subsequent release on LSOlive always make for positive headlines and euphoric reviews, as was the case with Leoš Janáček's opera Katya Kabanova, which premiered at the National Theatre in Brno in 1921. Like many other operas, the work tells a story of love, entanglement and final tragedy. However, it is also a moving portrait of an unconventional, passionate woman who breaks with the realities of her time and the society in which she lives and pays a high price for it in the end. The character of Katya is young, sensitive and desperate for love. But trapped in a remote village in the countryside with a bored husband and his snobbish family, she finds no way out until a summer storm changes everything. Katya Kabanova's story is uncompromising, honest and full of intense human emotions, which Janáček has also translated into music that is able to get to the heart of the matter in an unsparing way. This recording is the second production in the highly acclaimed and critically acclaimed cycle of Janáček opera recordings on LSOlive under the musical direction of Sir Simon Rattle. The cast of the recording includes the great tenor Simon O'Neill and the American soprano Amanda Majeski as Katya in one of her signature roles, which she has already sung successfully at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. The British trade journal Opera Today raved: "Majeski devotes herself to the role of Katya with such passion that one worries how she can come down from the emotional peaks and abysses she climbs".