Review: Janacek: From the House of the Dead ****

Using Dostoevsky’s novel, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, Janacek captured life in a Siberian prison camp in a series of personal cameos that relate the story of how the inmates came to be there, most knowing there is no hope of freedom.

Though a great masterpiece, performances are few, and it is difficult to stage a story where the lack of movement is an essential part of the hopeless drudgery that faces the prisoners each day.

For his new production for Opera North, John Fulljames works on a largely empty stage and misses the claustrophobic atmosphere of the small cells to which the prisoners were confined. Composed at the end of his life, Janacek’s orchestral scoring was thin, allowing the words to be readily heard, and though Opera North is performing an English translation, Fulljames resorts to projecting words on the scenery.

Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts makes a highly believable Luka; Peter Bodenham the world-weary Elderly Prisoner who murdered his unfaithful wife, while Alan Oke brings a vivid picture of Skuratov who killed a German.

The orchestra, conducted by Richard Farnes, sounded short of rehearsal time, the string intonation, particularly in the opening, often having an uneasy edge to it.