Met's Fall 2009 Production of Janacek's From the House of the Dead Saturday Matinee

The Met Saturday matinee broadcast on March 20 will be a Fall 2009 performance of Leoš Janáček's From the House of the Dead. The broadcast will be carried by Classic 99.1 KFUO-FM beginning at 12:00 noon (CT). Approximate running time 1 hour, 40 minutes.

From the Met's web site:

With this new production, voted Europe's best opera staging for 2007, one of opera's great visionaries makes his Met debut. Patrice Chéreau, renowned for his legendary centennial Ring cycle at Bayreuth, directs Janácek’s drama of human resilience inside a Russian prison. "The penal camp is a different society, parallel to ours, but there are many similarities between the two," Chéreau declares. "Power, relationships, humiliation, passion—all those things exist in both worlds." Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen also makes his Met debut, and Peter Mattei leads the ensemble cast.

From Anthony Tommasini's November 13, 2009 New York Times review:

In composing voice parts for his characters, Janacek obsessively mimicked the rhythms and contours of the Czech language. Much of the vocal writing, sung here in the original Czech, sounds like pitched speech. To provide impetus and continuity, the orchestra churns away constantly beneath the vocal lines. Fragments of melody and rhythmic licks are fashioned into a collage like orchestral fabric. Ostinato figures are repeated endlessly.

On one level, the repetition conveys the drudgery and routine of prison life. Yet in another way — especially as conducted by Mr. Salonen with such visceral character and pungent textures — the repetitive riffs evoke the thoughts that get stuck in the minds of the prisoners: resentments, violent fantasies, feelings of betrayal, isolation and yearning.