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Janácek: From the House of the Dead

from: Decca

Release Date July 09, 1991
How do you make an uplifting opera out of a group of exhausted, demoralised, malnourished prisoners stuck in the Nineteenth Century equivalent of a Stalinist Gulag? Let Janacek show you how.

This is a piece where practically nothing happens. A new prisoner arrives, there's a bit of aimless brutality, the prisoners put on a ramshackle show, a caged eagle is given its (symbolic) freedom and...er...that's about it. The most interesting action happens in a series of long narratives, life-stories told by prisoners to while away the endless time spent in this hellhole.

Yet this is throughout edge-of-the-seat stuff. Janacek, in the last opera of his Indian Summer, uniquely captures that 'spark of humanity' to be found in ... Read More: