I love the operas of Leos Janacek. So do audiences — when they go to see them. But the works remain stubbornly on the outskirts of the repertory.
When I was just getting started as an operagoer, I went to see “The Makropulos Case,” the Czech composer Leos Janacek’s tale of a woman desperate to elongate a life that has already lasted three centuries.
It left me exhilarated, dazed and with only one thing on my mind: buying a ticket to return the next weekend.
I’m not the only one to have this reaction. “People felt they had to come back,” Yuval Sharon said recently about the audiences when he directed “The Cunning Little Vixen,” another thrilling, heart-rending Janacek opera. “It was unlike any piece they’d experienced. It just seizes you.”
That’s still my feeling about Janacek’s operas. On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra finished an elegant but crushing concert version of “Jenufa,” which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there.
The end of ‘Jenufa’
Elisabeth Söderström and Wieslaw Ochman; Vienna Philharmonic; Charles Mackerras, conductor (Decca)
For this brutal account of small-town woe, Janacek wrote earthy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths. There are obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters, as well as passages of folk-inspired sweetness.
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Source: Music - nytimes.com
