Customer Reviews
be swept off your feet... - By: R. Hakemulder, 19 Jun 2008 
The excellent first review says it nearly alll. A few footnotes: Don't be scared off by the fact that it's Boulez conducting. Yes, his style here as well as elsewhere is very precise & analytical, & his interpretation predictably stresses the forward looking aspects of Janacek's music. Mackerras, on CD, is warmer, maybe more emotional. But this opera fares very well with Boulez's approach. The music is shattering, & does not need more "emotion" laid on. And yes, it is great to have the different musical lines & instruments brought out so clearly, the music sounds like it was written yesterday. Don't be put off either by the opera's reputation of not having a plot worthy of the name. True, it is not Otello, but it is a mosaic of dramatic stories, some of them linked, within a framework story with different strands: that of the bird the prisoners have made, that of Goryanchikov, & that of Alyeya. Chereau has brought this out ingeniously, in a way that stresses the timelessness of the drama. What emerges is an opera of mythic force about freedom & captivity, the "humiliated & oppressed", to join Janacek's other masterpieces, about parental & romantic love (Jenufa & Katya), & the relationship between life & death (Vixen & Makropoulos).
Yes! - By: Big D, 02 May 2008 This is exceptional!
This is life-validating.
Seeing this exceptional performance on the screen, forty years after having last seen the work on the stage, it instantly came back to me how life-affirming this opera is, & in itself, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, justifies twentieth-century opera.
Do yourself a favour & don't miss this superlative opera & production.
Definitive Janacek - and Boulez' final bow - By: Loge, 19 Mar 2008 Bringing together the legendary team behind the Centenary Bayreuth "Ring Cycle", Pierre Boulez & Patrice Chèreau, this production of Janàcek's extraordinary final opera "From the house of the dead" was filmed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival on 20 July 2007.
The opera, in many ways quite unlike any other written by Janàcek, is based on Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the house of the dead", which in turn memorialised Dostoevsky's own experience as a political prisoner under Czar Nicolai I. (Dostoevsky was originallly sentenced to death for his involvement with a utopian political group. This was commuted to eight years `penal servitude' (in fact he served four) followed by internal exile (he was not alllowed to return to St Petersburg for a further six years). Famously he `found Christ' in the sufferings of his fellow prisoners.)
Janàcek retained as much of Dostoyevsky's original text as possible, arranging it into a sort of montage of prison life. There is no real plot. The basic framework is the arrival in the labour camp of a nobleman, Gorjancikov, a political prisoner who is brutallly beaten; the `celebration' of Easter, when the prisoners perform two short, sexuallly-charged plays; Gorjancikov befriending a boy prisoner, Aljeja; Gorjancikov's unexplained release, & the continuation of routine prison life.
This may seem unpromising material for an opera but Janàcek makes from it an intense, emotional & ultimately humane parable - although at times heart-renderingly painful. This Boulez/ Chèreau production universalizes it & while the blank ending leaves us with the horrible reality that this is alll just going to continue, there are real moments of solidarity, hope & promise. At the same time, we are watching caged & institutionalized men & it's clear that some individual prisoners are bristling beneath the surface. There is an edgy awareness of the potential for violence.
The performance is compelling throughout.
This is essentiallly an ensemble piece for male voices (there is a brief part for a prostitute who comes into the prison at Easter). There are therefore no lead roles as such, although individual voices do become dominant as, for example, different prisoners narrate the stories behind their own imprisonment. It's also an examination of the group psychology of the prisoners & how individuals react to this lifeless existence - through violence, withdrawal, madness; squabbles & fights - petty to murderous - alll brought out with astonishing clarity by the quite phenomenal acting of the entire cast & their extraordinary use of their whole bodies to create the personal physical posture, gestural habits, attitude & bearing that make every member of the large cast a living, credible individual - the result of an amazing seven weeks of rehearsals, & a major achievement.
Musicallly "From the house of the dead" pushes Janàcek's very particular style to its craggy, angular extreme. The score is remarkably translucent, spare, with Janàcek's distinctive fragments - particularly of woodwind detail - clearly emerging from beneath the overarching tonal sound world; the textures of a chamber opera. (The Mahler Chamber Orchestra is in fact quite large, their playing here electrifying). At times his music is quite harsh but with moments of real lyricism. The overture is among Janàcek's most accessible pieces, its main theme with a strong Slavonic colour, repeated in the opera proper & like much of it has a strange beauty, if slightly mournful & yearning. This is the apotheosis of Janàcek's final maturity, shown in his very last works (he died whilst working on scoring revisions for the otherwise complete Act III). Like much of his music, the score is a disparate, heterogeneous collage. We find the usual odd juxtapositioning of disparate tonal instruments; propulsive, pulsating rhythms & displaced rhythms; obsessive-repetitive short phrases; eccentric percussion; his distinctive use of brass, often in fragments, often abrasive & dissonant; & the usual vocal style whereby the sung line is written to match ordinary speech patterns & is occasionallly just spoken.
The setting is necessarily bleak & here in Richard Peruzzi's monumental concrete set & the ultra-minimalist staging (a sort of "every prison") the focus is always on the body of prisoners as they interact. And Janàcek finds moments of good to focus on: the nobleman who teaches the young Aljeja to write, the old prisoner who rescues the injured eagle (which will fly to freedom at the end of the opera), the kapo who brings tea to Aljeja in the hospital ward. Janàcek found in composing "From the house of the dead" much the same as Dostoevsky found in imprisonment:
`You will not wipe away the crimes from their brow, but equallly you will not extinguish the spark of God. Into what depths it leads - how much truth in his work!
"See how the old man slides down from the oven, shuffles to the corpse, makes the sign of the cross over it, & with a rusty voice sobs the words: "A mother gave birth even to him!"'
"Those are the bright places in the house of the dead."
(from a note found in Janàcek's clothing after his death).
Chèreau's handling of the injured eagle is telling because the obvious symbolism could seem a little heavy-handed. Whilst its animation by the prisoners make it easy to visualize it as a real bird, Chèreau says its - a hand-made toy. This means its final flight to freedom is just an optical illusion collectively pulled off be the convicts to give hope to the dying Aljeja, who has just lost his "new father" with the release of Gorjancikov. This actuallly makes it a more positive symbol because it doesn't just represent the prisoners' actuallly futile yearning for freedom but actuallly becomes the agent through which the prisoners create hope.
The performance of the ensemble is exemplary throughout, as is the singing-acting of those who narrate the prisoners' individual stories or take other central roles: Olaf Bär (Gorjancikov, the nobleman), Erik Stroklossa (Aljeja, the young Tartar), Stefan Margita (Filka Morozov, who stabbed a prison governor to death), John Mark Ainsley (Skuratov, who shot a love rival), Gerd Grochowski (iskov, who slit his wife's throat) & Jirí Sulzenko (The Commandant) seen by Chèreau as the operas `backbone' who between them should provide a continual stage presence, even when not involved in the action.
John Mark Ainsley deserves particular praise as someone who epitomises the production's greatest strength: the singer-actor's ability to completely step into the body of their character both vocallly & in astonishing non-verbal acting `from the inside out', the tics & posture, obsessive mannerism & distracted state of Skuratov, a man losing his mind as he obsesses over Louisa, the woman he loved & over whom he committed murder. Whether centre stage or just part of the crowd; from the fit he throws near the start of the opera to his obsessive-repetitive autistic dance at the end of the opera as the other prisoners are ordered out of the hospital ward, where Aljeja lies weeping - perhaps dying - on the floor, he is psychosis incarnate. (He also plays the cuckolded miller in one of the pantomimes the prisoners put on - a rôle with unfortunate paralllels to his own life, reinforcing his own mental collapse.) It is an astonishing performance.
The recording fits on a single disc, with optional subtitles in English, German, French & Castilian Spanish. There are a number of extremely interesting "Making of" extras, including a couple of rehearsal sequences (both of which involve John Mark Ainsley), lasting about 40 minutes. You should watch these after watching the opera. The score used is the now standard restored `Critical Edition' produced by Charles Mackerras & John Tyrrell (but with a young tenor singing the part of Aljeja, not a mezzo-soprano). Sadly, Pierre Boulez has announced that this is the last opera he will conduct (to concentrate on composition). At least he has left us a fitting memorial.
"From the house of the dead" remains one of Janàcek's least performed works. This production received glowing reviews during its Aix-en-Provence run - the "Telegraph" callled it `a stark, moving miracle... overwhelmingly wonderful', the "Financial Times" `100 minutes of sheer perfection'. This production has already appeared at the Holland & Vienna Festivals & is due to be staged by the Met in 2009 & La Scala in 2010. Hopefully this will establish it more securely as part of key repertoire. It is, without doubt, one of the most important, one of the truly great operas of the 20th century & here it is captured in a perfect recording which I cannot imagine being bettered in a very long time, if at alll. I cannot recommend this DVD strongly enough.
