Now Janáček is taken over by those who know better
NewsThe Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa is planning a staged version of the Glagolitic Mass next month in the composer’s home town, Brno.
Leos Janáček was primarily an opera composer. He decided to write the Mass as a concert work.
Why does Hrusa think he knows better? He is pairing the Glagolitic Mass with a performance of Janáček’s last opera, From the House of the Dead.
Perhaps “Dima” Tscherniakoff had a few free days in his busy schedule. . . or one of the other usual perpetrators.
Great festival in Brno!
Jakub Hrusa is a fabulous, and a deeply serious, conductor. If he has a plan to stage the Glagolithic Mass I’m sure he will have a good reason for doing so. It’s incredibly dramatic music, and I would rather see this than recent efforts to stage Bach passions, or Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. Why don’t we all wait and see?
People have produced any number of works as an opera – Damnation of Faust, for example. So why not?
Hrůša knows Janáček inside-out, and is a fabulous conductor of his works. He wouldn’t ever claim to know better than Janáček, although he does know his music better than most.
The Glagolitic Mass is robust enough to enjoy being tinkered with. It’s a staging, not a desecration. It might be quite good; at worst, it’ll be a worthy experiment. At any rate, this sort of thing is never a matter of someone thinking they know better. The moment we regard pieces as holy and put them in a glass case is the moment they die.
Don’t be such a bore.
Calm down, Norman. Mr. Hrusa (whom I have played under, and very much enjoyed) is not decreeing that the Glagolitic Mass must henceforth always be staged–he does not presume to “know better”. He is doing a single staged version of it. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Those who attend may judge for themselves. Some years ago, the Lyric Opera here in Chicago did a very successful staged version of the Berlioz masterpiece “Damnation of Faust”, which Berlioz never intended to be staged. The world did not come to an end.
Sounds fantastic! I wish I could be there.
Maybe they know better because the biennial Brno Janáček Festival, where that particular event is one of many offerings devoted to his music, is the preeminent showcase for Janáček’s works and scholarship of his life and art. Several concerts are held in historic sites around town like the Mahan Theatre and the site of the Sokol Stadium, where some of his works were first performed.
Four years ago, they mounted productions of all nine Janáček operas and nearly every other major work he composed — the one missing work was his Glagolitic Mass.
They’re so reverent of the man, they even hold a graveside ceremony at the Central Cemetery where he’s buried in “the circle of honor” among other native sons and daughters the likes of Rudolf Firkušný and Vítězslava Kaprálová; plant geneticist Gregor Mendel lies at another end of the cemetery with his St. Augustinian abbey brethren.
If Janáček is your thing, Brno is the pilgrimage to make in November of even-numbered years.
Perhaps it’s “From the House of the Dead” that they’re staging, and they’re just doing a semi-staged kind of thing with the Mass – similar to what Peter Sellers did with Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” (?). If so, that wasn’t so bad. I saw that at Disney in L.A (Salonen).
Staging was suggested by the Janacek Festival and will be done by Jiri Herman, one of the best opera directors in the country. The result might be rather good…
Why don’t you mrntion who’s plot is “House of dead”? We all here must hate Russians and everything regarding them
The piece will probably be in A flat minor, Janáček’s favorite key in most of his works.
He simply couldn’t get enough of it!
Could be interesting to shed new light on this piece by performing it staged, no?
And now Hrusa is to lead the Royal Opera House. Perhaps he knows better? He is a superb artist
And of course now he has also taken over Covent Garden
Money and prestige, Norman.