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Welsh National Opera’s production of From the House of the Dead.
Riveting … Welsh National Opera’s production of From the House of the Dead. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images
Riveting … Welsh National Opera’s production of From the House of the Dead. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images

From the House of the Dead review – landmark staging demands to be heard

This article is more than 6 years old

Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Welsh National Opera’s revival brings David Pountney’s 1982 version back to grim and glorious life and restores Janáček’s original musical vision

Janáček’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s partly autobiographical novel, set in a Siberian prison camp, is not an opera for the fainthearted. The fate of those incarcerated in a hell pit is a desperate one, but the crushing brutality of the guards and the violent stories recounted by the convicts carry an even more shockingly cruel edge. Yet such is the searing power of the music that it makes for a riveting, if draining, experience. It is in the tiny gestures of humanity that consolation and hope can be felt, even if only momentarily.

This Welsh National Opera revival of David Pountney’s staging of Janáček’s final opera – first seen 35 years ago – was in itself a landmark occasion but its return also marked the first performance of Janáček scholar John Tyrrell’s new edition of the score, which returns to the composer’s original intentions, removing well-meant but inauthentic additions made by colleagues after his death. WNO music director Tomáš Hanus, a Czech whose childhood was spent just streets away from the composer’s house in Brno, clearly has the music in his blood and brought a nervy, urgent immediacy to its drama. The lashing of the timpani to mirror the hundred lashes to be inflicted on the newly arrived political prisoner Goryanchikov was an early alert to the murderous percussion writing, its frequent metallic clattering depicting not simply the chains and shackles but also the mini-Nibelheim of a smithy even deeper underground. Albeit heralded by the solemn Easter bells of Russian Orthodoxy, the lighter atmosphere of the pantomime plays felt like respite.

A truth like no other … From the House of the Dead at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images

Unlike the other two operas in Pountney’s Russian revolution-themed season, this was sung in English, every syllable articulated to perfection. Part of the discomfiting effect of hearing the characters enumurate their lives and crimes – both passionels and premeditated – is that it is often less confessional than braggadocio. But every singer here pushes themselves to the utmost in portrayals of great force, notably Alan Oke’s Skuratov, Mark Le Brocq’s Luka Kuzmich and Simon Bailey’s Shishkov.

The strength of the piece is not only its grim reality, but also the knowledge that – somewhere, everywhere – such histories are being revisited, and will be again and again. Janáček speaks his truth like no other. He demands to be heard.

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